Section 86 of the Legal Profession Regulation Bill prescribes a mandatory pupilage scheme for every lawyer admitted to the Nigerian Bar from the date of the commencement of the Act. At the Lagos State Administration of Justice Conference Lagos, 2017 and the NBA Section of Business Law Conference Lagos, 2017, I strongly opined that a mandatory pupilage programme without minimum salary will convert our young lawyers to slaves. I still hold that view today.
I have reviewed the Legal Profession Regulation Bill and I find two gaps that we need to cover.
The first one is that the Bill does not create mandatory duty on the Legal Profession Council of Nigeria to prescribe minimum emolument for pupils. It is true that one of the prescribed responsibilities in the bill is that the Council shall make rules for “funding of the pupil programme”. This provision in my view is not enough to take care of the responsibility to provide minimum emoluments for the pupils. We should have a provision in the bill that clearly state that “the Council must prescribe mandatory minimum emoluments for pupils.”
I have my doubts if pupilage can be successfully implemented in Nigeria. I also question the efficacy of pupilage as a solution to our low professional standards as long as the Bar continues to show disinterest what we do with legal education at the LLB and Law School levels. I will fully address this aspect later.
But if we must have pupilage, then our pupils must be paid a fair and mandatory minimum wage. In England, where we want to copy pupilage from, the Bar Standards Board prescribes a mandatory minimum salary for pupils. The current regulatory minimum salary is £12,000 per annum.
The second gap in our proposed bill is the date of commencement of the pupilage programme. The bill says it is “from the date of commencement of this bill.” The bill should rather provide an open commencement date. It should rather state that “from the date pronounced/ prescribed/ordered by the Legal Profession Council of Nigeria….” This is the only way for such a huge venture to have the chances of serious implementation success. An open date will create the opportunity to set up the Council after the Bill is enacted into law.
The Council will then go into serious studies of what will or will not work; accredit law firms that have the requisite facilities and capacity to take pupils; write the rules and guidelines to deal with the scope of activities for the pupilage, minimum salary, treatment of pupils, complaints procedure etc. The Council would also have the time to train the first set of Pupil Supervisors, and set up the Division responsible for the pupilage programme. This would also be the time to focus on the reform of legal education especially at the foundation level- the LLB programme. Pupilage without reforming legal education at the foundation is putting something on nothing.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. – Peter Drucker
By Prof Ernest Ojukwu, SAN (Chair of the Future State of the Legal Profession Subcommittee of the LPRRC)
