As a junior, what are
the few things you might want to know to become a senior litigator/ counsel of
Law ?
1. It’s all about
appearances:
If you’re a counsel, you have to
make yourself seen in court that means that you have to sit in the library and
visit the Bar Association room, ever so often. You have to become a familiar
face, so that solicitors recognize you and eventually give you work.
You won’t actually get any work done in library or in Bar
room. There are no plug points where you can plug in your laptop. That’s too
noisy with too many distractions. There is very little place on the tables for
you to keep your papers.
In fact, to a very large extent, the library is meant to be
nothing more than a waiting room, where lawyers sit, wait and often socialize
until their cases “reach”, i.e., until their cases get called out before the
judge.
As a junior counsel, though, you have to act like you’re
working in the library – you have to be seen ordering books there and reading.
That will give solicitors the impression that you’re busy, and so you will get
work, or at least that’s the idea.
There is one more thing you need to know about the library,
though – it has a many books that you might not find in your senior’s chamber,
and so it’s important to be able to know how to get books there.
2. You will start
slow:
No matter who you are or what your family background is, you
will get very little work in the beginning. You will get few or no chances to
appear and argue (even less so if you don’t belong to a “legal family”). Your
senior at the Bar will pay you no money. This is not necessarily a bad thing –
it ensures that you’re not an employee for your senior, and that you can take
outside work as well.
3. There are many
entry barriers to litigation
You will often see that there are two kinds of lawyers who
become counsel:
(i)
Children of lawyers or judges; or
(ii)
Children
of business families.
There are a few reasons why this is so:
First, counsel practice is a big risk. You make little or no
money in the beginning. If you have to pay rent or earn money to provide for
your family, counsel practice is not for you, because you won’t make enough
money for at least a few years. As a consequence, it’s only if you come from a
reasonably well-off family and if you have a flat to stay in without paying
rent that you can afford to become a counsel. It’s only the sons/daughters of
lawyers/judges (or those from business families who are reasonably secure
financially) who can brave the risk of becoming a counsel.
Second, getting a position in the chamber of a senior
counsel is very hard. There are reasons for this. For Example, when you join a
senior in Bombay, you join that senior for life. The senior doesn’t pay you
anything, and that means that he can’t fire you. He’s stuck with you for the
rest of his life. That means that a senior will be very cautious before taking
someone on as a junior. If law firms like Amarchand, AZB or J Sagar hire newbie
nobody lawyers from a National Law School, and then don’t like their work, they
can always get rid of them. Not so for a counsel, which is why it’s so hard to
get into a senior’s chamber in Bombay.
As a result, it’s usually only the sons/daughters of the
well-connected – again, children of lawyers/judges or businessmen (businessmen
who have hired senior counsel in the past and so know them well) – who can get
into these chambers.
4. Moot courts were a
joke
If you enjoyed mooting as a law student, and thought that
you would get into litigation because of it, you’re in for a rude shock. First
of all, moot courts were all about the law, but litigation is about facts. In
moots, students often skip the facts by saying something like “if your
Lordships are conversant with the facts of the case, I will come to my
arguments in law…” This is unheard of in counsel practice before Court. In fact,
it’s often said that law schools teach you to apply complex law to simple
facts, whereas in litigation, you apply simple law to complex facts.
Second, preparing memorials for moot courts does not train
you for preparing pleadings. Memorials are like written submissions, which come
only at the end of a heavy case. Preparing pleadings, on the other hand, is
nothing like writing a memorial. It’s a remarkably mundane process, where you
have to respond to each and every paragraph of the pleadings made by your
opponent (the process is called making “para-wise denials”) and you have to
“deny and dispute” everything which goes against you. On a lighter note, you
will learn to use redundant repetitions while drafting in counsel practice. For
example, you will write phrases like “deny and dispute” or “repeat and
reiterate” often.
Third, you will never get the luxury of only preparing for
one case for several months, like a moot court. Often, the papers will come to
you only a week before the case comes on board. Often, you will have many
matters to work on such that you can't give all your time and thought to just
one case.
Oh, and one last thing.
When someone asks you for your “number” in court, don’t give
them your cell number. They’re only asking what your number is on the board.
Good luck!
No comments:
Post a Comment