There is a big elephant in the room of the legal practice in Nigeria that nobody wants to address; not even senior lawyers or activist lawyers or even the Nigerian Bar Association is ready to open this up because it appears that everyone is complicit and guilty.
This elephant is the remuneration and salary scale of young lawyers working in some law firms in Nigeria.
99% of young lawyers in Nigeria are taking home meager sums as meager as ten thousand naira as monthly pay. You need to speak to some young lawyers to see them complaining bitterly about how they are unduly exploited by their bosses whom they work for. They work them like elephants but pay them like ants. How can you be paying a lawyer who spent 6 or more years acquiring education ten thousand naira per month? Some law firms pay 15k, some pay 20k, some pay 30k, some pay 40k.
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Just a few elite law firms in Nigeria are paying young lawyers N100,000 and above and young lawyers fortunate enough to be earning such amounts are less than 1%.
Some law firms have working hours of 7 a.m. daily resumption time and close by 7 p.m. The lawyers are meant to be in the office by 7 a.m. and close by 7 p.m. otherwise they will be queried. This is pathetic.
It is shameful that this payment of meager salaries goes on not just in the offices of established senior lawyers but also in law firms of senior advocates of Nigeria. Unfortunately, in some of these law offices, a young lawyer is not just an in-house counsel but the office secretary, a Personal Assistant to the boss, an errand boy/girl and (s)he will still go to court to file and argue cases for a take-home pay of 20k. This is unjustifiable.
You will step into a big office and you will think that no lawyer in that office is earning less than 100k a month only to be told that some lawyers in that beautiful and well-furnished big law firm located in the heart of the city are earning 25k a month. I am not making this up, I promise.
It is high time we open up and have this conversation about how senior lawyers are exploiting junior lawyers in disguise of employment. Everyone has been avoiding it but this is the time. It has gotten to the point where the NBA will have to step in and set up a committee to look into young lawyers’ remuneration, make stipulations as to what is commensurate pay of young lawyers and implement it.
For a start, the Legal Practitioners Privileges Committee need to start making remunerations of young lawyers in the firms of the SAN applicants as one of the qualifications for becoming a SAN; the requirement should be included that no lawyer in the office of a SAN applicant should be earning less than a stipulated amount, and any SAN paying his or her lawyers less than a stipulated amount should have his or her SAN title withdrawn; this requirement will be much appreciated compared to the requirement of a SAN applicant having a working library.
It should also be the NBA’s requirement for its officials or those contesting to be elected into the NBA offices that no lawyer in their firms should be earning less than a stipulated amount if not they will be disqualified.
It is as simple as if you as a senior law cannot afford to retain and pay lawyers a sufficient amount, you should not employ them and if you must employ them, employ them as consultants or part-time workers; you should not employ lawyers and use them to boost your human strength or use them as show off or boast of the number of lawyers working for you when you can not afford to pay them a substantial amount. It is sheer wickedness.
As for some of the senior lawyers who always make excuses and justify this wickedness by comparing it to what they got paid when they were young lawyers, with all due respect, they should understand that what was in play in the 70s, 80s, 90s or early 2000s when they were young lawyers and budding in the legal practice is no longer in play in today’s Nigeria. For starters, the economy is far harsher now.
And as for those who are quick to ask young lawyers to open their own law offices if they feel they are not well paid by their employers, they should understand that not everyone has the dream of opening and running a law firm. Every lawyer in practice must not open his own law firm before he can excel. Some lawyers want to work under other lawyers but they should be properly taken care of while they are at it.