Living Locum Legalis | Part One
This is the story of how for one moment I together with a friend created a smartphone application for Malaysian lawyers like no other in the world and how it came to an end. It all started with the legal practice of ‘mentioning on behalf’, popularly known as MOB; we pronounced each letter individually. MOB was the practice of a lawyer appointing another lawyer to stand in and attend a routine court appointment for them. Before the court administration system was digitized, MOB was common because a lawyer had to be physically in court to attend a routine court appointment. A lawyer would have another lawyer MOB such a court appointment for them when they could not attend it, did not want to attend it, or when it was convenient and cost-effective to do so. An example of when a MOB was convenient and cost-effective to use would be in the following scenario: I act for a defendant for a legal suit filed in Penang. The plaintiff’s lawyer is based in Penang. My office is in Petaling Jaya, Selangor. There is a routine court appointment in Penang for both parties’ lawyers to attend. The purpose of this appointment is commonly to update the court about the progress of pre-trial preparation. Such an appointment often took anywhere between two to ten minutes. It usually does not require both parties to be present. One of us will suffice to keep the court abreast of developments. In such a situation, I would commonly ask the Penang plaintiff lawyer to MOB the routine court appointments for me. Or I may get another lawyer in Penang to MOB them. Whatever the case I would not be attending. If I got another lawyer to MOB for me instead of the plaintiff lawyer, I would usually have to pay the lawyer MOBing for me a small fee. It would be anything between RM 50 to RM 150, depending on what the MOBing lawyer was asking. To have a lawyer MOB an appointment for me has several benefits both to the client and lawyers. It is a win-win all around. Firstly, it is cheaper for the client to have a lawyer MOB for me a routine court appointment than it is for me to attend it personally. If I flew up for it, there would be my airfare, airport taxi, food and time costs. That easily exceeds RM 1,000. Hiring a lawyer to MOB only costs RM 150 then. The client benefits from the huge cost savings for routine court attendance with MOB. Secondly, it is convenient for me to hire a MOB lawyer. I am relieved of the task of having to attend and wait around the court to attend such an appointment, only for it to be over in a few minutes. I can use my time now for something more productive – schedule a meeting, work on a submission or case, etc. Thirdly, a lawyer gets to earn a fee for attending a routine court appointment for another lawyer. It was easy work for a MOB lawyer. They knew only what they needed to know about the case. They didn’t have to read up the whole file or deal with any law per se. If a MOB lawyer could score RM 150 per appointment and get five cases a day, that worked out to a sweet RM 750 per day. Multiply that by twenty days in a month. That’s not small change to be sniffed at for a solo or small firm for very easy work. I heard at one point there were certain firms that ‘specialized’ in MOBs. That meant the firm’s work consisted primarily or only of MOBs. The MOB fee income helped the smaller and newer firms find a form of income when legal work did not come through. However, being a MOB lawyer was, over the long term, a dead-end job. It was like working at a fast-food cashier or cook for life. You earn but there’s not much to learn and almost no career growth. The downside for a ‘pure’ MOB lawyer was that nobody would ever think of them to conduct a matter of any importance in court. MOB was around the moment I started practice. In fact, that was the first assignment I was given as a pupil: Get a lawyer to MOB the firm’s case that morning and ‘get another date’ pending compliance with court directions or something or other. So my first day and assignment of pupilage saw me approach at least five or six lawyers who were queued up before the court interpreter to inform them of their presence. It was important to do this. The court interpreter was the one that called up the cases for the court to deal with. If she didn’t know you were around, she would only call up our cases towards the end of the court’s sitting, which was close to noon. Back then, not all lawyers were keen to MOB a case for another lawyer, especially one they did not know. So we, pupils assigned to such a task, had to persevere a bit and keep asking any lawyer we saw to help us out. If I exhausted the supply of unwilling lawyers in a particular court, I would then roam the other courts to find a willing lawyer. I had to do this for Session Court matters because as a pupil I had no right of audience there. Finding lawyers to MOB a case for us in the Kuala Lumpur or Shah Alam courts was a tedious and nerve-wracking experience. I remembered as a pupil, always wondering what would happen if I could not find a lawyer to MOB our case for us. Thankfully, I somehow and eventually found one each time I needed one. However, that was not as bad as finding a lawyer to MOB a case for us outside the Klang Valley. That was something I continued to do well into my early
