Lawyers must maintain standards

The legal profession in Kenya is a woebegone fraternity, ensnared in the tempestuous vortex of ruthless and inexorable flux. Constantly intensifying globalisation demands that the advocate retains relevance before an expanding and increasingly diverse, far-flung market.

Every day, the forces of political and economic integration instigate the evolution of novel processes, institutions and instruments to facilitate the efficient and harmonious interactions between states and firms.

The dark side has not been left behind, either: extreme misanthropes and malignant sociopaths now have access to a global stage on which to perpetrate divers atrocities, exerting unprecedented pressure upon law enforcement and judicial institutions everywhere on earth.

Technology retains both its neutrality and stupendous capacity as an equal-opportunity facilitator and exponential multiplier of all potentialities, fair and foul.

The promise of law and legal institutions to stand in as honest brokers, bridge yawning chasms, pour oil on troubled waters, provide comfort and security for every stripe of actor in the public and private sector to engage and transact with confidence, has never been in greater focus.

Delinquent agencies now have the means to circumvent, undermine and compromise the most sophisticated and robust legal bulwarks, installed through the painstaking ministrations of indefatigable, conscientious legal professionals with impunity.

Jurisdictions the world over are alive to the implications of this extremely complicated and abysmally fraught operating environment. Concern about the integrity of strategic institutions of the political economy is a persistent preoccupation for leadership everywhere.

Past epicentres of globally significant economic disasters have incorporated lessons learnt to develop more responsive and effective institutional models.

As political economies which incubated globally dominant multinational corporations, their legal systems are designed to launch and sustain cross-border corporate competitiveness, and their legal professions are finely attuned to the consequent imperatives.

The rise of Kenya as a logistical, trading, commercial and investment hub has made Nairobi the operational lodestone of major business interests. Inevitably, many auxiliary professional functions have similarly gravitated to Nairobi, most notably top calibre legal chambers with global reach.

Consequently, even as these munificent multinationals establish their footprint in sophisticated fields of enterprise and emerging sectors, the best Kenyan chambers struggle to find briefs, because they are hampered by a horrendous capacity shortfall, and cannot compete with highly proficient outfits from the would-be clients' home countries.

Thus all the attractive fields of legal practice are now dominated by foreign firms which employ expatriate personnel. Everything in this universe - from the subject matter, vocabulary, processes, technology, to the billing culture, milieux of client engagement and even the amounts involved in casual discourse - is utterly bewildering for the majority of our learned friends.

Any doubts pertaining to the veracity of the foregoing assertion must surely be dispelled by evidence of the response and adaptation mechanisms deployed by Kenyan legal practice. The first and most worrying of them is the adoption by the Law Society of Kenya, of a policy to ‘protect the bread and butter' of lawyers by using state policy to create a monopoly for its members in certain organisations as well as proceedings.

The second, and closely related, is the radicalisation of lawyers into embittered vigilantes hunting down ‘impostors’ for arrest and prosecution, notwithstanding the fact that in many instances, nothing distinguishes the average advocate from a slick charlatan without one day of law school in his cranium.

The third, and most pathetic, is the torridly escalating vogue of identity erasure, dilution and substitution through crude anglicisation and whimsical initialisation of firm names.

Thus, Henry Nyangweso Isaboke will renounce this identity and hang out his shingle under the name and style of HNI LLP or the such like. Should he team up with my other friend Arborgast Luvai Indangasi, there is an option to adopt ‘Arborgast & Henry’, or initialise as A&H.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with the use of fore and surnames in any combination and permutation, socially or otherwise. It is just that as a strategic response to intense competition for lucrative work from international firms, it is plainly desperate and hopelessly ineffectual.

The reason, of course, being that market demand in every sector gravitates to value propositions, and not attractive packaging. In other words, the challenge is substantive, not cosmetic, insofar as clients seek a demonstration of integrity, efficiency, sound learning and imagination, and would pay for it, regardless of whether the letterhead reads “XYZ” or ‘Laban K. Chebusit & Associates'.

Therefore, nothing screams “Impostor!” louder than a lawyer who relies on nominal tinkering to transform their value proposition.

It will take more than a decade of dedicated effort to get the standards of our legal profession to the level where global competition does not drive us to resort to ridiculous spectacle.

The LSK must summon the fortitude to stop the perennial looting of its funds and use the savings to finance scholarships for thousands of advocates in critical fields of legal practice. High standards raise entry barriers for quacks, and enable Kenyan lawyers win exciting briefs without deceptive advertising.

- The writer is an advocate of the High Court