Colosseum or Coliseum also known as the Flavian Amphitheatre in Rome |
What do lawyers
do? As we juggle words and shuffle papers, we render our services in
helping our clients to get out of
whatever legal troubles they land themselves in and carry out their endeavours
by obeying the law.
A woman walked
into the office half an hour before our office closed. She needed some legal
advice. I decided to see her as I thought that should not take long. As it
turned out , I had to ask one of my staff to stay back to type a letter and
photocopy the documents which she had brought with her. These days, I find that
I have become less independent at work in the sense that I no longer wish to
attend to the clerical part of the work. The woman’s problem was to do with her
husband’s and as he had suffered a
stroke, she had to deal with a legal problem that was to do
with a property that he had rented out years ago. After listening to her story
for some twenty minutes, I told her that in order to stop the execution
proceedings that are already set in motion, it would be practical to offer a
good sum of money as ex-gratia payment to the claimant that happened to be the
Electricity Board. She had brought along all the necessary documents and it was
apparent from those documents
that they had engaged a solicitor
as soon as they got wind of what the tenant had done before absconding years ago.
Notwithstanding the correspondences between the previous solicitor and the
Electricity Board, the latter had gone ahead and obtained the judgment without
the couple’s knowledge. Even though she claimed that the electricity had been tampered with by
her previous tenant, as the subscriber for the particular account, her husband would be
liable to settle the outstanding charges for all intents and purposes. I could
tell that she was not a push over though she acted like she was just a
housewife who needed legal advice and she was apologetic. That reminds me of
another incident where the wife had acted like she was merely taking
instructions from the husband and that her husband would be very furious with
her if she had not executed the instructions given by the husband properly. I
could not recall what exactly happened in my other case but all I remember was
that it had left a bad taste in my mouth and yet I never learnt simply because
I believe that it is our professional duty to render legal help to these
ordinary folks.
When I asked the
woman how she ended up walking into my firm, she said she happened to be in the
vicinity when she went to the bank a few doors from our office and she decided
to walk into our firm. As we were preparing the letter for her, one of my
office partners returned to the office after a meeting. When I saw that they
acknowledged each other, I asked her why she had not mentioned that she knew my
partner. Later on I found out from my partner that he had already handled a
couple of matters for her. Maybe I should give the woman the benefit of the
doubt that she was just confused.
While I do find that clients do not
usually give you the complete picture, I still feel that it was quite
unnecessary for her to be evasive about how she ended up coming to our firm for
consultation. She must have figured out that since my partner said he would not
be available on that day, she did
not have to mention the fact that she knew and had consulted one of our firm
lawyers on other matters before. To me, all these are tell tale signs as
to whether a client is being completely honest with you. I
became less sympathetic to her plight upon knowing that she had not been completely honest with me.
became less sympathetic to her plight upon knowing that she had not been completely honest with me.
To Kill a Mocking-bird
is a book that I had been meaning
to read for years . There is a copy of the novel sitting on one of the
bookshelves in my house and my husband tells me that the book belongs to me. I
cannot remember buying the book. As a bibliophile, I have not read all the
books that I have bought over the years and with a few
exceptions, I usually remember
having bought them. Anyway I was very glad that I finally got round to reading
the book at the end of my recent trip. When I finished reading the novel on
board the flight home , I was touched and moved to tears. I wonder whether the story would have affected me as much as the
present if I had read it before I started practising law. The author, Harper
Lee is indeed a very good story teller. She gradually led us into the story
through the voice of Scout Finch who had recalled her growing up years in
Maycomb when she and her
brother who was four years her
senior were both children. While the core of the story is about racial
injustice,the author painstakingly took us through the scenes and the
characters in Maycomb to help us
understand the neighbourhood and their inhabitants. Atticus Finch is a widower
and he had to single handedly bring up two young children with the help of
Calpurnia, their cook who had been with the family since Jem Finch was born.
Lemonade in the morning was a summer-time ritual for their household as
Calpunia would set a pitcher and
appeared in the front door and yelled
‘Lemonade time !
You all get in outa that hot sun ‘fore you fry alive!’ Scout had
felt her tyrannical presence as long as she could remember and Atticus always
took the side of Calpunia and ‘Atticus said Calpurnia had more
education than most coloured folks.’ Atticus played and read to his children , and treated them
with courteous detachment.
‘Maycomb
County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself’ is how
Lee describes Maycomb.
‘ Maycomb was an old town, but
it was a tired old town when I first knew it . In rainy weather the streets
turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the court- house sagged in the
square. Somehow, it was hotter then; a black dog suffered on a summer’s day;
bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square.
Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon,
after their three o’clock naps, and by nightfall were life soft tea-cakes with
frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.’
Atticus went to
Montgomery to read law and returned to Maycomb to begin his practice after
being admitted to the bar. His first two clients were the last two persons
hanged in the Maycomb County jail . As there was nothing much Atticus could do
for his clients who refused the state’s generous offer to escape the gallows if
they pleaded guilty to second- degree murder, he had a distaste for the
practice of criminal law. He practised economy more than anything. Scout
started going to school and one day,
someone in school announced that Scout Finch’s daddy defended niggers so
she had to ask Atticus.
“‘Do you
defend niggers, Atticus?’ I asked him that evening.
‘Of course I
do. Don’t say nigger, Scout. That’s common.’
‘’s what
everybody at school says.’
‘From now on
it’ll be everybody less one – ‘
‘ Well if you
don’t want me to grow up talkin’ that way, why do you send me to school?’’
Scout had wanted
to avoid school but her dad would not let her quit school as it was the law. She
had a profound distaste for school since the first day of school when the
teacher discovered that she could read and her teacher had ordered that she
should ask her dad to stop teaching her to read.
Atticus
explained to Scout about why he had to defend Tom Robinson.
‘Atticus sighed.
“I am simply defending a Negro –
his name’s Tom Robinson. He lives in that little settlement beyond the town
dump. He’s a member of Calpurnia’s
church, and Cal knows his family ell. She says they ‘re clean –living folks.
Scout, you aren’t old enough to understand some things yet, but there’s been
some high talk around town to the effect that I shouldn’t do much about defending
his man. It’s a peculiar case-it won’t come to trial until summer session. John
Taylor was kind enough to give us a postponement…’
“ If you shouldn’t be defendin’
him, then why are you doin’ it ?’
For a number of
reasons, he told Scout.
‘ Because I could never ask you to
mind me again. Scout, simply by the nature of the work, every lawyer gets at
least one case in his lifetime that affects him personally. This one’s mine, I
guess. You might hear some ugly talk about it at school, but do one thing for
me if you will :you just hold your head high and keep those fists down. No
matter what anybody says to you, don’t let ‘em get your goat. Try fighting with
your head for a change….it’s a good one, even if it does resist learning.’
‘ Atticus,
are we going to win it?’
‘No , honey.’
‘Then why-’
‘Simply
because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us
not to try to win,’ Atticus said.
…….
‘Come here,
Scout,’ said Atticus. I crawled into his lap and tucked my head under his chin.
He put his arms around and rocked me gently. ‘It’s different this time,’ he
said.’ This time we aren’t fighting the Yankees, we’re fighting our friends.
But remember this , no matter how bitter things get, they’re still our friends
and this is still our home.’
The character,
Atticus Finch is inspiring and his courage and principles are what everyone of us must try to emulate and uphold.The story is brilliantly told.