Result of The First Cross-evaluation of The Legal Community Published.　Public Prosecutors’ Performance Ranked No. 1 with Lawyers Following in The Rear.

The long-awaited result of the cross-evaluation among judges, prosecutors and lawyers in the Taipei legal community is finally published. This is also Taiwan’s first-ever cross-evaluation of the legal community.

 

The performance evaluation of judges, first of its kind in the legal community, was initiated by late M. S. Lin, Attorney-at-Law (1934-1997, founder of Taiwan International Patent & Trademark Law Office) in 1992 during his term of office as the President of the Taipei Bar Association (TBA). The subjects evaluated were the entire body of the judges of the Taipei District Court and the Taiwan High Court and they were evaluated by the TBA members. The Judicial Reform Foundation (Foundation) inaugurated its own annual evaluation of judges of the same courts in 1996 with an evaluation of prosecutors of the same courts concurrently held in 1999. In 2003, the Foundation successfully introduced the evaluation of lawyers to the Hsinchu legal community. Originally designed to pull together the lawyers’ opinion of every subject based on their personal impression, the evaluation has evolved with increasing objectivity to collect the law practitioners’ comprehensive comment on the subjects they have encountered based on their practical experience dealing with them in court.

 

In response to the increasing demand from all sides for a sophisticated evaluation, the Foundation, the Taipei District Court, the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office and the TBA jointly announced on January 30, 2004 to work together on a tri-partite cross-evaluation among the Taipei legal community. This cross-evaluation is relatively complicated in terms of method and content. It is based on a performance watch spanning over a period of one year divided into two phases (02/01/04 - 07/31/04; 08/01/04 01/31/05) each followed by a taking of the cross-evaluation from the judges, public prosecutors, investigating prosecutors, and advocates of the parties in criminal actions pending ordinary proceeding in court and the criminal complaints pending prosecution at the prosecutors’ office. The items of evaluation include such general items as the attitude of the court, documentation quality, level of excellence of the preparatory proceeding, trial proceeding, examination process, presenting of argument, and such specific items as occurrences of case long-pending with no cause shown, moral character/conduct and fitness for the job.

 

The result of the cross-evaluation reflects some objective truths such as (a) the evaluated subjects’ awareness of their own position in court has increased in the framework of the new criminal procedure system which has been instituted for two years, and (b) public prosecutors’ performance are rated the best of all in conformity to the public’s general impression on them. It is believed that lawyers have brought up the rear because they have no access to such resourceful administrative support as the judges and prosecutors do. This also manifests law practitioners’ lack of sufficient on-the-job training and specialty practice area. (2005.9)

CYJ/EMA