The Legal Janitor

An addendum to the previous post, something which I meant to blog about but forgot to.

Perhaps I have been made soft by the legal culture here in Melbourne, but the conduct and communications here by and between lawyers have almost always been collegial and professional. Which leads me to this point:

A. There is no need to act like an asshole be rude.

I find the tone taken in the above letter to be unnecessary. Why be so condescending? It is possible to be polite and firm, without having to resort to sounding like a complete douchebag be unpleasant. And yet, this is precisely the tone taken in the above letter. Repeat after me: it is unprofessional to be rude.

Further, I am not the only one who has noted the amateurish approach taken by the firm which sent the letter above. Professor Ang Peng Hwa himself has noted:

Secondly, if they insist on their day in court, they should confine the issues to minimise any ’spillover’ effects. For example, they should not demand that the loser must run an advertisement in all the newspapers in Singapore to apologise.

As I pointed out in my previous post, any lawyer worth his or her salt and having some basic grasp of the workings of the internet would not have made that demand.

Edit: In retrospect, I have been overly harsh with my words. Even worse, I have fallen prey to the very thing I’m arguing against; I sounded like a complete douchebag. lol. I should take my own advice.

I have started working as a lawyer this year, and I will record my thoughts on legal practice on this blog.

1. Your Client is Your Worst Enemy

All my mentors, both from Singapore and here in Melbourne, have stressed this point. There is nothing worse than a bad client. The bads can come in many forms:

This list is not exhaustive. I have only put down what I can remember off the top of my head. Clearly nobody wants to take on a client who will not pay their fees. Further, unreasonable demands often will escalate those fees, which they will later on dispute, not realising that their demands are the very reason why those fees have risen.

Of course, it is expected that a part to a dispute will present only their side of the story, but I strongly believe that a lawyer would be derelict in trusting their client completely without verifying the complete facts before proceeding with any sort of action. It is not a good look if you proceed on the story given to you by a client only to find out later that they have conveniently left out facts which prove fatal to their case.

Which leads me to point 2.

2. Learn to say NO

This obviously comes with experience, but at any point if one has a feeling that a client would turn out to be a bad one, you would be better off not taking on that client. The time, energy and tears wasted is just not worth it.

3. Take notes. Everytime.

The difference between a low legal practitioner’s liability insurance and coming before a hearing panel of your peers while your insurance premiums have gone through the roof, are those scribbled notes that you made while in attendance with your client.

These handwritten notes are the only record of what instructions and “facts” your client has fed you, and therefore your only protection against a bad client who would invariably turn around and accuse you of malpractice when their proceedings fail.

4. Understand the context, or just say No.

It sounds like a no brainer in saying that one should not act for clients in unfamiliar matters, but you’ll find that this happens more often than not, with disastrous consequences. A recent example proves illustrative of this point. [copy obtained from xiaxue's blog post]

The firm above, which shall remain unnamed, has shown a stunning ignorance of the workings of the internet. Back in the days when the state-owned media is the sole gatekeeper of the flows of information, demanding a defendant retract their allegedly defamatory statements on the mainstream media coupled with an apology might have made sense. However in the internet age, such a demand will certainly backfire.

Understand the Streisand effect. Know it by heart, for it will save you and your client unnecessary expense. The signal-to-noise ratio on the internet is so high that most people would not have heard or read defamatory statements published on a SINGLE blog. However, the moment one decides to use the law to silence speech, the result will be the mass proliferation of the statements on other sites, resulting in the exact opposite of the desired outcome. I quote renowned libertarian activist John Gilmore, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

I argue that for any competent lawyer who has at least some inkling of the dynamics of social relations on the internet, the default position would be to advise your client NOT TO SUE, pending further research and enquiries of all facts and specifics. Of course, if your client instructs you to take action regardless of the merits of their case, learn to say no (refer to point 2.)

5. Seek views from the young ones.

There is an unpleasant tendency for some older lawyers to talk down to the newly admitted junior lawyers, but it is a fact that respect, and learning, flows both ways. Just as we new lawyers have much to learn from the esteemed members of the profession, there is much that new blood brings to the fold as well. The law is a system of rules governing relationships between people and entities in society, and so as society evolves, those rules will also have to evolve. There are often times where the rules lag behind changes in social and technological dynamics, and it is in these instances where the weight of experience AND habit becomes more a burden than an asset.

It is the young lawyers, who come in unfettered by the force of old habits, and with a fresh mind, who will be able to offer the most in terms of insights into the evolution of these social dynamics.

In other words, you can teach an old dog new tricks, you just have to get the pups to share.