Vietnamese lawyers are still short on specialization and professionalism, local newspaper Vietnam Investment Review reported Monday.

Local lawyers accept any cases, civil, criminal or commercial, which keep them working but does not allow them opportunities to improve their skills in a specific field, while many of them are not fully capable of handling cases involving "foreign" elements, mainly due to poor foreign language skills, the paper quoted Le Hong Son, deputy head of the Judicial Assistance Department under the Vietnamese Ministry of Justice, as saying.

"When Vietnam joins the World Trade Organization, Vietnamese lawyers will be required to have profound knowledge in each field of activity they are in. If not, it is like the case of a doctor who undertakes to examine and treat all kinds of disease, but finally fails to heal any," he said.

For Vietnamese lawyers to meet the bar in the integration process, the Ministry of Justice believes that it is necessary to have lawyers specialize in legal areas relating directly to international economic integration, such as investment, trade, service, intellectual property and settlement of international commercial disputes, the newspaper said.

By late March, Vietnam had a total of 3,918 lawyers, of whom 2, 035 had certificates to practice law and 1,883 were trainees.

There was an imbalance in the number of lawyers between cities and rural areas, and between deltas and mountainous areas. The capital city of Hanoi had 2,023 lawyers by late March, while the northern mountainous province of Ha Giang only four, according to the ministry's statistics.

Source: Xinhua