My Legal Baptism
In my twenty-three’ish year career at the Bar, there were two times I wanted to quit legal practice. The first time was after my legal baptism. And no, it wasn’t my call to the Bar. Calls are the formal legal baptisms. They are tame, sterile and at best, daintily pleasant affairs. It is a boat on a placid lake. The real legal baptism is when a lawyer goes through an experience or ordeal so harrowing they seriously question whether they saw a future for themselves in legal practice. That one is a boat in a tsunami. Mine happened sometime between my second and third years of legal practice. It happened at an appeal in an outstation High Court located at a state south of the Klang Valley. The appeal was against a Sessions Court’s dismissal of our client’s summary judgment application (‘SJ application’). An SJ application filed by the plaintiff invites the court to enter judgment against a defendant on the grounds that the claim is clear and conclusive and the defendant has no defence to it. A defendant can defeat the application by disputing the facts of the claim or raising a defence to it. Our client’s SJ application was to enter judgment only on liability against a firm of solicitors for negligence with damages to be assessed. What that means is we were asking the court to determine first whether the solicitors were at fault or not. The amount of compensation would be dealt with separately and later. The reason for that was the facts of the case. One day, to his surprise, our client was personally served a bankruptcy notice at his office. He headed one out of the many subsidiaries of a public listed company. Bankruptcy meant losing his job. The notice claimed he failed to pay in accordance with a court consent judgment he allegedly entered into several years previously. A court file search later showed there was in fact such a consent judgment entered in the Magistrates Court. The judgment showed that our client along with the other defendants were represented by a firm of solicitors. Essentially one firm represented all the four or five defendants. We wrote to the solicitors. We attached the judgment and asked them to confirm our client’s appointment of them. They wrote back candidly confirming our client did not appoint them directly. They claimed one of the defendants had appointed them to enter judgment on behalf of all the defendants. The solicitors said they did so because said defendant claimed he acted for our client and the other defendants. We wrote back to ask for the letter from our client authorizing said defendant. They responded to say there was none. So our client sued them, the said defendant and the plaintiff company. He sued the plaintiff company to set aside the consent judgment against himself. He sued the firm of solicitors for negligence. Seeing as how the solicitors had admitted their gross negligence by their own hand, I thought liability was an open-and-shut matter. All I had to do was chuck the judgment in, add the exchange of letters, and affirm the magic words (see O 14 r 2(1) with Form 13 of the Rules of Court 2012) et c’est voila! – a court-winning SJ application, liability only. I now know, that when I start thinking that way, things are likely to go downhill from then on. And so it did. I attended court several times before the Sessions Court eventually dismissed the application. During one of my visits, I met an acquaintance there. When I told him the firm I was suing, he felt sorry for me. He told me the firm was an established one. The proprietor of the firm was well known in the state and did work for the customary government political parties. You are unlikely to win in this state, he told me ominously. Our client appealed the dismissal of his SJ application to the High Court. On the first hearing date for the appeal, I went down with my boss for the hearing. On the morning of the hearing, I met up with my boss at the office at seven in the morning and drove down together. I think I was between my first and second year of practice then. We arrived an hour earlier as my boss was the sort that liked to be at court at least an hour before it rose. After breakfast nearby the courts, we went over just before 9am to wait for it to open. 9am came and went. The door remained locked. No other lawyers came or passed by the court. We seemed to be the only ones waiting outside court for the court to be opened. After half an hour of waiting and wondering, we went to the court registration counter to find out what happened with our case. We met with a clerk. She told us the judge was not around because he was in Shah Alam hearing an old part-heard case. I was incensed at the situation. Why weren’t we given notice about this? The court had ample time to inform us our hearing was adjourned. That would have saved us a trip down! I complained to the clerk. The clerk sarcastically replied that since our hearing was taken off, my boss and I should take the opportunity to ‘cuti-cuti Malaysia’. Then she turned and left. Still unaccustomed to how legal practice was in Malaysia, I grew more incensed at the insolent response. I ranted all the way back to my boss who listened to my naivete about what Malaysian legal practice should be. How could the court not inform lawyers beforehand it was taking the hearing off? How can the court demand courtesy and respect but not respond with it? Doesn’t the court know that clients end up wasting fees and legal costs like that? But that did not assuage the rage. When we got back to the firm, I headed
