The New South Wales Law Society has decided to broaden the pool from which jurors can be selected to include a broad range of once excluded professionals, including lawyers.

According to Law Society president Hugh Macken, most lawyers could serve on juries, apart from a small minority.

"It's worth remembering that currently anyone who has ever been admitted as either a solicitor or barrister is exempt from jury service," he said.

"It's not lawyers who are involved in practice and quite frankly, a lot of those people who have been admitted 10, 20, 30 years ago have never practiced or set foot in a court since.

"There's no good reason why they couldn't sit on a jury."

I had always thought that lawyers should be excluded because of their knowledge of the law.   When a person chooses between a judge or jury trial, the decision rests heavily on whether a technical knowledge of the law is required.  A single lawyer on a jury would make the entire group just about as knowledgeable about the law as the judge, for all intents and purposes.

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