What are bar councils for?

Much has been said about the issue of under-compensation and lack of any structures regulating pay, retention and progression in the legal profession and it is clear that the debate only needs to expand for greater representation of marginalized voices, especially while contemplating solutions for this.

While it is hoped that platforms organizing debates and allowing an opportunity for various perspectives to be shared in such conversations will make the effort of ensuring balanced and inclusive panels, it is also important to ensure that any deflection of responsibility of employers as well as that of the bar councils is not thrown at the law schools.

This is because there appears to be a suggestion in various articles and conversations that have taken place on this issue that somehow law schools are to be blamed for the poor quality of law graduates and that ‘oversupply’ of law graduates is also due to them. Law schools may well have their own domain of responsibility but are certainly not responsible for the role cut out for the bar instead.

This is an idea that needs to be engaged with so that the debate around pay, retention and progression in the legal profession can take place in the right context and is not conveniently shrugged off onto the shoulders of law schools whose role is not to prepare students for litigation as is commonly projected. An undergraduate degree prepares a student academically and is expected to help students develop academic skills including critical thinking, legal reasoning, academic research and academic writing whilst also developing substantive foundations of basic concepts in law and legal principles.

A student who proceeds to their post graduate qualifications then builds onto these academic skills and prepares themselves for a career in teaching and/or research. Most law graduates also opt for positions as in-house counsels, civil services, development sector or policy work. An academic degree is supposed to open a plethora of opportunities for graduates unlike the expectation in Pakistan that a law degree should somehow prepare the student primarily for ‘active legal practice’ and that if it does not, it is to be blamed for the poor preparation of law graduates to be in the profession.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. Determining the terms and process for entry into the legal profession for active legal practice is the responsibility of the bar council. This would include councils developing their own bar vocational course at par with the best in the world if they really are serious about ensuring quality and halting the ‘oversupply’ of graduates.

At present, bar councils have attempted to regulate and control the legal education being delivered in law schools and universities instead and in the process have ended up hurting the academic freedom and space for universities to develop competitive programmes by handing down a set curriculum and micromanaging their internal administrative affairs while also charging significant amounts as fee and charges at various levels such as for granting NOCs to law schools for offering certain programmes as well as for admission in law college of every student regardless of whether that student will end up in the bar or not.

At their end, they have introduced MCQ-based entry tests that do little to develop the advocacy skills of entrants. The Punjab Bar Council has only recently started a two-week bar vocational course which is mainly lecture based and, while it is a start, it is nothing like an actual bar course spread over a full academic year, focusing on developing advocacy skills and testing the candidates. Colleagues who have done their Bar-at-Law from the UK might be able to support this.

The oversupply of graduates in the profession is not because of law schools whose admissions have been capped at 100-150 seats since the two infamous cases in the Supreme Court that were filed to regulate and control law schools. It is there because the bar is not serious about ensuring quality vocational programmes and merit-based entry into the profession at their end that would raise the standards and limit the number of graduates entering active legal practice.

This needs to also be seen in another context: in Pakistan the regulatory and representative roles of the bar councils have not yet been segregated and young lawyers play an important role during bar elections which leaves little to no incentive for regulators to restrict the entry and ‘oversupply’ of young lawyers by prioritizing merit. This is reflected in their actions to increase the number of attempts for students to clear their entry exams and in reducing the passing percentages.

It is unfortunate that despite efforts by some lawyers like Raheel Samson Khan who have been advocating for stipends for young lawyers for a while now, the bar councils don’t even come together to talk about establishing a fund for young lawyers. The bar has not even instituted any support to fund students who get selected for international moot competitions, representing Pakistan in international rounds as finalists. This despite bar councils charging a fee from each student who gets admitted to a law school. This could well come under their role of promoting legal education as it would enable students who get selected nationally as finalists to represent Pakistan to come back to the profession with international exposure and advocacy skills.

If they can set up a benevolent fund and other schemes, why can’t a similar fund be established for ensuring dignity and right to work for young lawyers? It appears that young lawyers are good for their votes but when it comes to their rights and basic protections, bar councils fail to include them or address their rights as there aren’t any specific seats for young lawyers in the bar councils through which they could have representation and voice to raise their concerns. The exploitation, therefore, does not start with the law firms nor does it end at the bar councils.

Just two years before the 2020 bar council elections (which take place every five years) in 2018, the Legal Practitioner and Bar Councils Act 1973 was amended to increase the minimum period of legal practice required to be eligible to be a candidate for the bar council elections by five years. As a result, where previously ten years of experience was required, now fifteen had to be completed. Consequently, many lawyers who would have qualified to be a candidate in 2020 had to wait out another few years to meet the new requirement.

Such steps are anti-representation and perceived as a pushback against younger voices in the profession that the old guard seems disinterested in including. It is therefore time that the role and responsibility of the bar councils and the need for them to be democratized and made more inclusive and representative of young lawyers, women and religiously diverse communities are not ignored in the larger debate surrounding restructuring of the legal profession for it to be a sustainable career option for law graduates.

The debate would also include how the interests of different stakeholders including firms could be balanced by establishing a fund for stipends, paid internships and basic pay structures for associates that can be supported by such a fund at percentages or other formulae agreed with the law firms to ensure that the legal practice remains an attractive and viable career choice for all young lawyers, especially those that don’t come from privilege.

The writer is a diversity and

inclusion advocate. She tweets/posts @NidaUsmanCh

The writer is a diversity and inclusion advocate. She tweets/posts @NidaUsmanCh