ARE NIGERIA LAWYERS UNINTELLECTUAL, BORING AND BROKE

The practice of law does have positives. There are brilliant moments of triumph and self-actualization as well as the defeat and ennui. If the question had been "ARE NIGERIA LAWYERS, INTELLECTUAL, JOYOUS AND FLAMBOUYANT I'm sure we would have gotten some good write ups too.

However, reminiscing the Ondo State elections debate 2012 brought about this write up, one of the then contenders a SAN and former President of the NBA Rotimi Akeredolu, contrary to what everybody expected, the learned Silk performance was unimpressive and laid back,  it appears as if, years of using legalese and court room theatrics has eroded him of strong political acumen and stagecraft needed on such occasions.

The ability to articulate one’s vision matters. Alluding to the holy book, ‘out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks’! Often, when the mouth is unable to speak sense, the probable cause could be that the heart is shallow. The implication of a shallow heart on communication could include incoherence and uttering mediocre solutions to serious challenges as Ondo State people witnessed during the debate.

This made me to wonder what might have caused the learned silk to perform so miserably, in my quest for answers i dabble into this lawyers personality theoretical, which i believe might be applicable to Nigeria lawyers too.

The law will make you into the worst kind of person.

If you believe that one's personality is shaped by one's life experiences, then you should be very worried about what the practice of law will do to you. I suggest that you should fear the inculcation of the following highly negative personality traits:

Unintellectualism. Contrary to popular belief, the law is not a particularly "intellectual" profession. Most of the reasoning in legal argument is patently casuistic. Legal arguments are often made in a "kitchen sink" fashion, throwing every conceivably plausible argument into a brief, regardless of the relative strength of the arguments or coherence of the submission as a whole. The practice of law is the development of a habit of extreme intellectual dishonesty where the routine is to state one's opponent's arguments as uncharitably as possible in aid of weakening their impact and conceal every possible fact or principle that is against one's interest which one isn't explicitly required to disclose.

Arrogance. A lawyer is surrounded largely by non-lawyers who come to him/her for expert advice. That alone can encourage some arrogance, but even more is necessary for the psychological warfare between lawyers. Lawyers often try to use extreme false confidence (a.k.a. arrogance) to intimidate one another into

tactical concessions, e.g. by making the other lawyer think that they've screwed up, that "things are always done this way," etc. That is a tactic especially used by older lawyers against younger ones. The younger ones need to develop their own armor of arrogance to resist it.

Pettiness. As I've been emphasizing, much of the nastiness in the practice of law is in small-minded disputes about nothing points of procedure and other maneuvering for tactical advantage. Do you really want to practice being the kind of prick who demands that pleadings be thrown out for being one day late? Uninterestingness. The practice of law takes so much of one's time that one can engage in few activities with the rest of one's life. It is also so stressful that one tends to obsess about it. The result is that lawyers can become very boring people, with nothing to talk about except their ugly jobs.

Impatience. Litigation is very stressful. Also, the law is a very deadline-driven occupation, especially in litigation. There's always more work to do than there is time to do it in, and there's always a court and opposing counsel breathing down your throat with respect to strict deadlines. If you miss a deadline, the consequences can be terrible: a lost case, a malpractice claim against you, etc. Don't be surprised when this spills over and you find yourself swearing at people who walk too slowly while crossing the street.

Aggressiveness. Again, the psychological warfare between lawyers rewards this, and not to forget some diabolical clients that will stop at nothing to win a case.

Lawyers are annoying

That lawyers are annoying is one that has more than a grain of truth to it, in my experience. In about two years of actively practicing law, I came across numerous examples of utterly atrocious behavior, often in litigation. It's not always big things -- though big things are the ones that hit the news -- but patterns of obstreperous behavior and downright stupidity that can wear you down over a day-to-day basis. Bickering over stupid document production requests, delays, phantom schedule conflicts... all these things add up. Contemporary lawyering is often an expensive form of childish game-playing with the rules of civil procedure. It's psychological warfare for minute tactical advantage.

Then there are the lawyers in your own firm, who have been embittered by years of this crap and by long hours. And then there are the clients, who want judgements immediately their cases are filed in court, or have been badly screwed through unnecessary adjournment and are consequently distrustful and hostile toward the entire world . Not surprisingly, both groups of people act so annoying.

And it's not just a matter of the pressures of the law turning people into jerks. I think we can easily believe that annoying people select themselves into the practice of law. Autoadmit. 'nuff said.

Then another group is the charge and bail lawyers, lurking around magistrate courts for over night cases: "overnight cases” – roughly meaning persons charged to court as soon as they are arrested or apprehended in the course of committing a crime - usually crimes like stealing, larceny, burglary, housebreaking and the like. Most of these accused persons are usually small time and poor. They cannot afford ‘big shot’ lawyers and many times their families and relatives are even unaware of their arrest and subsequent arraignment.

The Charge and bail Lawyer is often a creation of circumstances – chances are that when he left Law School he was unable to find any Lawyer to employ him, those who will employ him are unable or unwilling to pay him a dime and there will be numerous Seniors who will impress it upon him that he is still learning the trade and as such will only be entitled to some stipend; still others will regale him with tales of how the big lawyers of the day started small and how we all start small and why he should start small.