In my previous essay The Bar Council Maligned, I wrote that section 42(1) of the Legal Profession Act 1976 (LPA), which sets out its purposes, should be the Bar Council’s (BC) Northstar. It is the what, why, and how its resources and efforts are spent. How those competing and contradictory purposes are met is a matter of negotiation within and to some extent without the BC. A unifying narrative about what those provisions in the …
Last month, I submitted my nomination papers for the Bar Council 2021/2022 elections. I am offering myself as a candidate to be elected for that Bar Council election. I have been thinking about this for some time. I believe the time has come for me to do it. I am doing this because I feel that now I can meaningfully contribute to the Bar Council. Before this, I served the Bar in a variety of …
Recently the complaint of fee undercutting arose amidst the ongoing mutual recriminations between a section of the senior and junior members of the bar; a complaint that emanated from the senior lawyers are that junior members with newly set up their firms were responsible for the undercutting of fees. An understandable concern by the senior lawyers is when competition is fought mainly on price, quality inevitably takes a hit because it ceases to be a …
When I started practice at the Bar in 1999, the Bar Council elections were not the contentious, fractious, politicized and aggressive election we have now. My sense of it then was it was gentlemanly; lawyers offered themselves for election and relied on the strength of their reputation and nominators’ reputations to get elected. There were no overt campaigns and certainly no manifestos about what one would do if one got elected. You were elected because …