A lawyer, Yemi Adedoyin Shyllon has called on the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) to organise an entrepreneur and vocational seminars for skill development outside the legal profession, particularly for the benefit of fresh law graduates.
He also called on the NBA to improve interaction between the judiciary, the bar and the police. Shyllon made the call during the monthly meeting at the Knowledge sharing session of the Ikeja branch of NBA. He spoke on, ‘’Challenges faced by lawyers in Lagos State.’’
The event was co-chair by Mrs Adejoke Layi- Babatunde, the Deputy Editor, Lawbreed, publishers of the Supreme Court judgment. Shyllon said that NBA is expected to advocate the interest of its members, serving as a major platform for the collective voice of lawyers in Nigeria.
He said the group should focus on professional development of lawyers and serve as a good platform for networking among lawyers. He charged the NBA to provide, through its conferences and seminars, the platform to address and proffer solutions to the challenges faced by its members.
“NBA is falling short of meeting these expectations and failing to address the challenges being faced by lawyers in Nigeria, with a view to furthering the improvement of the professional practice of its members,” he stated. He noted that the poor economy and increasing number of law students qualifying as lawyers have added more pressure on career success.
“Nigeria’s highly increasing number of private and public universities, with 38 of the current number of over 200 Nigerian universities, are producing law degree graduates.
“Graduate lawyers are trained to be admitted by the Council of Legal Education for practicing as legal practitioners by 14 campuses of the Nigerian Law School, as against only one campus during my time at the Nigerian Law School, Lagos.
“So, every year, over 4,000 new lawyers are called to the Nigerian Bar to service fast dwindling client opportunities.
“This, therefore, results in an oversupply of lawyers. Yet, this huge number of new lawyers are being produced yearly for absorption by Nigeria’s declining employment opportunities, social and economic environment,” he pointed out.
This, he explained, is why a good number of fresh lawyers end up struggling to find jobs, many years after their call to the bar.
“We unfortunately now have thousands of fresh lawyers, taking up menial jobs, grossly unrelated to their training,” he lamented, adding that it is the reason some of the fresh wigs hustling for jobs around courts, are derogatively referred to by the public, as ‘charge-and-bail Lawyers.’ The chairman of the NBA Ikeja branch, Mr Oluwaseyi Olawumi, thanked Shyllon for sharing his vast experience with lawyers at the occasion.
