Not as glamorous as Boston Legal

Article from Star.

Putik Lada:By MELISA TAN MEIN SZE

More and more young lawyers are considering leaving the profession for better remuneration and greater career advancement opportunities.

YOUNG lawyers can be loosely defined as lawyers with less than seven years of practice, or below the age of 40. They are a vital component of the profession as they make up 25% of the 12,500-member strong Malaysian Bar.

Rather shockingly, a recent survey showed that as high as 66.7% of young lawyers are considering leaving the profession within five years.

Contrary to popular belief, the majority of lawyers in Malaysia are underpaid, and the profession hasn’t exactly been generous towards young lawyers. More so, if you work in a smaller firm.

Depending on the city and size of the firm, a newly qualified lawyer’s starting pay could range from RM1,500 to RM2,500.

In a survey conducted by the Bar Council’s National Young Lawyers Committee last year, 59.2% of the respondent young lawyers indicated that they were dissatisfied with their current salary, while 68.8% were not happy with their salary increment.

Lawyers in medium to large and more prominent firms are better paid, with a starting salary of RM2,800 to RM3,000 but some have deemed the raise not adequate, as more often than not such raise in salaries is accompanied by an increase in minimum billable hours or an extended work load.

As young lawyers, being inexperienced and on a rather steep learning curve, most are often struggling to work around the clock and to put in long hours to satisfy the never-ending demands of clients, to meet up with expectations of their bosses as well as the firm’s minimum billable hours policy.

As a result, they quite often find themselves being caught in a situation involving very hard work with very little pay off.

Work and life integration has increasingly become a very crucial issue most young lawyers have to deal with.

Studies in the United States and Australia have interestingly come out with the term Generation-Y lawyers – referring to those born in 1978 or after.

They are ambitious, and want to grow professionally, but are carefully considering the trade-off to their personal life if they were to blindly meet the demands of firms (or their clients).

These young lawyers are less willing to put in long hours compared with their predecessors and are instead more focused on preserving the quality of life or balance in life.

Young lawyers in practice therefore need to learn to structure their life to support, and accomplish, both personal and professional goals.

Apart from that, clients today are more demanding of lawyers than ever. They want fast results at low cost, and have high expectations towards the responsiveness of their lawyer or how the law should solve their problems.

It is expected of young lawyers to use technology as a work element and to be able to effectively and efficiently use email, Internet, teleconferencing as well as mobile phone to communicate with clients.

Further, living in the age of globalisation means that young lawyers cannot afford to remain isolated and idle: they are expected to spread their horizons and reach out further for cross border work, and keep up with current trends, in order to meet the expectations of the global market.

Competition has also led to the pressing need for lawyers to find their area of specialisation.

Unlike before, general law practice can be tough and may not be sustainable in view of the global atmosphere and this has led to the escalating need to find a niche and drive towards specialisation.

Most young lawyers have now begun to feel the pressure to differentiate themselves from the thousands of other lawyers in the legal profession.

Apart from the practical aspects, many young lawyers have also joined the legal profession only to find that lawyers are no longer held in high regard by the public.

The negative public perception against lawyers is largely attributed to some bad apples tarnishing the reputation of the profession.

Public confidence in the Malaysian judiciary continues to remain very low due to the lack of political will to acknowledge the problems the judiciary is facing.

All these have directly or indirectly discouraged young lawyers from joining or staying in practice.

Your lawyer friends probably have already told you, legal practice is never quite as glamorous, hard-hitting and high-paying as what is portrayed in television legal fictions such as Boston Legal and Damages.

Annually, the Bar records a fair number of lawyers leaving the practice.

Some leave the profession entirely while some move to the corporate scene (often better pay, hours and benefits), to become in-house legal counsel.

The Bar is also gradually losing more talented young Malaysian lawyers who are increasingly seeking opportunities to practise as foreign lawyers in other jurisdictions, such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai for better remuneration and greater career advancement opportunities.

Well, practice is not all a bed of roses, and will never be.

Of course, on the other hand there is still a substantial number of young lawyers who have found passion in practising law, and the profession a satisfying one.

Not to mention that many have chosen to remain in practice, progressing from pupils to associates and ultimately to partners.

Having briefly mentioned the various difficulties in dealing with the reality of practice, I can’t help but leave this to the last.

> Young lawyers of today should nonetheless challenge themselves to stand firm and carry themselves as future leaders of the Bar (and the country).

> They must adhere to the profession’s code of ethics and uphold the integrity of the profession to restore the public’s confidence in the profession.

> Most importantly, young lawyers should carry on the Bar’s tradition in upholding justice without fear or favour.

These, in my humble opinion, should be the greatest challenges for our esteemed young lawyers of today.

> The writer is a member of the Bar Council’s National Young Lawyers Committee (NYLC). For more information about the NYLC, please visit www.malaysianbar.org.my/nylc