My good friend Shan and I were once at a post-hearing meal in the company of a very senior and well known lawyer. Shop talk was inevitable since we were lawyers; inevitably, I suppose, we got around to the topic of legal consultation fees. “If they cannot pay my consultation fee, I will not advise them. I will not even see them. That is a rule won from hard experience,” the senior lawyer said before …
I was asked this question once by a polite young Malay male student when I was on my smoke break when I was in University Sultan Zainal Abidin, UniSZA, as they call themselves, for a task that required me to stay overnight in Kuala Terengganu to complete. That happened on the first evening I was there. It was around the time after the transgender case I was involved with erupted in the media after the …
When deciding something critical, project myself to the distant future then look back at this present moment and ask myself, what would I like to have happen or assuming I have tentatively decided one way, what about that decision would I like to change now that I am in the future?
The recent intense discussion about pupil remuneration revealed an interesting dimension to the issue – a Master’s expectation of their pupil. The impression of that is Masters now expect a lot from pupils; they expect them to be ‘practice ready’ i.e. to be able to draft letters, applications and submissions competently, to know how to go about court, to deal with clients, to generally know how to run a case, etc. The inability of a …
Mathew Thomas Philip, a senior lawyer, recently made an interesting suggestion about pupils’ remuneration. His proposal was to replace pupil allowances with a pupil loan with comfortable repayment terms. That loan is meant to pay the Master (the pupil’s supervising lawyer) for the education and coaching of the pupil. Mathew reasons that since the pupilage period is an extension of the pupil’s legal education after university and since the pupil’s paid for their undergraduate and …