As another week comes to an end, I usually effect a review of the many news items on the various platforms. The one that particularly caught my attention was the side-drama in a particular court case that was reported in this highly esteemed newspaper.
The money involved was huge but that was not really the point. What arrested my eye was the tussle which played out when two lawyers announced their separate appearances for one of the well-heeled clients.
This client happens to be an oil company. The reader can begin to smell the money here since oil has been mentioned. Ultimately, the issue appeared to have been resolved by the intervention of the judge, who pointedly asked the representatives of the oil company as to who was their lawyer.
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Predictably, they weighed in on the side of the SAN with the caveat that the other lawyer who was originally assigned to the brief should work with the publicly designated lawyer. Case settled? Of course. But in the course of the proceedings, there was another revelation about the way these things work.
The lawyer that was not primarily chosen revealed that he did not charge any fee as such. Rather what he charged was according to him, a contingency fee, which means that if the case is won, he would be entitled to a percentage of the money in dispute. This brings to mind, one of the jokes about lawyers.
As everyone knows by now, lawyers do not joke with their fees. It is the lifeblood of the profession. So central is this feature that, a lawyer will tell you that if he provides a professional service to you, it would be illegal for him not to charge you for his services. Can you beat that?
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Now to the joke about lawyer’s fees. It was the end of the year in this top law firm somewhere in the United States. So a group photograph was to be taken with the lawyers in their grave robes. As they sat down, with some standing, the photographer had a problem. They were all looking glum in their intimidating sartorial garbs.
How do you bring life and mirth into this serious people? He hit upon an idea. He then told all of them to say ‘fees’ while he snapped them. Once they all intoned that magic word, smiles came to their faces. This must have been either out of sheer reflex or that shift in mental construct in lawyers, when the word, ‘fees’ escapes the mouth.
And talking of fees, one is reminded about several lawyers that I have had to deal with in the course of my official duties. They were forever moaning about their unpaid fees. It then occurred to me that, all said and done, ‘contrihard’, as the Ghanaians would say. And such is the ethical framework in the profession that as desperate as the lawyer may appear to be, he is forbidden from advertising.
Actually, and at a point in time in this country, the issue of fees and its availability was tackled in a creative way by a system, which sought to control the production of lawyers. The government lent a hand here by the heavy discrimination against the production of lawyers.
In the then oil boom Nigeria of the seventies, when scholarships were available for virtually every academic discipline, there was none for lawyers. The position of the government was that the country had enough lawyers and as such their sponsorship was not central to national development. But you can trust bureaucrats and their accomplices outside the system.
On one particular occasion, this unwritten rule was circumvented by the creative mandarins in the civil service. They decided to award scholarships not to law per se; but to a course which was termed: ‘humanities unspecified’. Now can you beat that? Under this generic nomenclature, many law students were able to obtain government scholarships.
Incidentally, what is being said here about lawyers was also drummed into my consciousness by my mother. As a school teacher, she knew one or two things about Nigeria’s educational matrix. She was always telling me that in the fifties, newspapers were always reporting that “the Nigerian Bar is full of Barristers”. This was a pointer to the overproduction, which hall-marked that era.
Looking back now, my mother was only partially right. This is because by the seventies, oil money was doing something to the economy, which was expanding exponentially, and as such, more lawyers were needed. And many of them also started to do well. So well that applications for admissions to read law took on a feverish turn. In the process, an oversupply was seen again. Again, various measures were put in place to contain this new expansion. The first was to lengthen the years of study by one year. Another measure was to cancel the various part-time programmes that produced a lot of what another lawyer has called: menopausal lawyers.
Some of my stranded colleagues in journalism have had to take cover under this umbrella of injury time legal education. But they have done so, only to realise that the scope for this category of late-comers is really very narrow. All the fat briefs have been cornered by the status-quo forces in the profession.
And indeed, there is at the moment, a virtual replay of what my mother used to tell me about over-population in the Nigerian Bar. Still, and for hardworking lawyers, the space is still there; such that the title of this piece can easily be reversed to read: two clients and one lawyer.
This, dear reader, was the positive lot of a lawyer-friend of mine, Ebun OluAdegboruwa. Very recently, two clients were virtually struggling over him. Thus, as crowded as the field appears to be, the imaginative, skillful and industrious lawyer will continue to thrive and shine. Have a happy weekend.
Professor Soremekun, former Vice Chancellor of Federal University Oye Ekiti, is the chairman, Editorial Board, BusinessDay Newspaper
