Lawyering often seems a solitary habit. No matter the size of your firm, when you enter court or sit down at the negotiating table it seems as if you alone carry your client upon your shoulders. Your client’s fate depends on your skills and your commitment. It can be a daunting burden, especially when you are starting out, or when you face a much more experienced opponent. Worst of all is when you are in front of a Judge with a heavy caseload and limited patience.

Part of this loneliness is simply the way it is. Something lawyers must cope with, because it comes with the territory of practising law. It could even be considered the flipside of one of the special things about lawyering ? the fact that we can just put on a black jacket and start serving clients ?we don’t need props, whether scalpels or scrub rooms, AutoCad design programmes or fancy calculators. In the delivery of our service to clients all that is needed is us (and the method of communication of the day ?a 100 years ago pen and paper, today a basic computer). So it’s not surprising that the practice of the profession is a solitary one.

But part of this loneliness need not be. Because lawyers share the same experience, and play the same roles, we can help each other. We should be able to pick up the phone and seek advice from other more experienced lawyers. Over coffee in the bar room, surely we can commiserate with each other on past travails and offer practical tips for future triumphs. Through the courses run by the Society, speakers give back to the profession something of what they have gained. Many of our senior lawyers give generously of their time in this way.

Our practice committees have also done a lot to consider issues and present views, and especially over the past few years, have had considerable success in having those views accepted. The result has been practical changes in the way things are done. Two good examples of this are the work of our Family Practice Committee and of our EFS Committee. I must also praise the efforts put in by nominees of The Law Society towards the work of the Chief Justice’s EFS Review Committee.

I would like to see more done by way of sharing experience, distilling lessons and ultimately putting forward ways in which the important job we do can be done better and more effectively. Lawyers are both users of and guides to the system. Without lawyers, the system would not work. Collectively, we can make things better.

Let me illustrate this with an example. Criminal lawyers often act for clients who attract little sympathy. Such clients are dismissed as desperados, dregs or devils. In individual cases, the unsympathetic character of the accused makes it hard for the lawyer to press legal principles of due process. When he does so, these legal principles are sometimes attacked as ‘technicalities? But these ‘technicalities?are ultimately important to the proper working of the administration of justice and criminal lawyers need to work together to help demonstrate this and to put forward sensible positions that can improve the way things work.

Take the question of discovery of documents by the prosecution. Many defence lawyers find themselves working in the dark, not sure of the prosecution case and having to react on the spot as details emerge in the course of trial. Might not the process be more efficient, as well as fairer, if the outlines of the prosecution case were disclosed earlier?

Naturally, there will be a prosecution perspective too, and one or more wider public perspectives, on this type of issue, but the defence bar should be prepared to debate these questions, drawing on its collective experience and present a coherent defence perspective.

In other words, not all a lawyer’s battles need be fought alone. One of The Law Society’s priorities in the coming year is to reduce this sense of isolation, by giving members a better avenue for sharing and developing views and a stronger platform for presenting these views to the authorities and to the public.

To this end, the first activity of the new Council will be a series of dialogues with members. These will be conducted with different sections of the profession, so that issues important to different people can be explored. From these sessions and the follow up work that Council will do, I am confident that members will see that they need be ‘lonely no more?

Philip Jeyaretnam, SC
President
The Law Society of Singapore