I refer to Charles Hector's letter Legal Reforms, not public service and Attorney-General Abdul Gani Patail's statement that lawyers should serve the public including people who may not be able to afford legal fees (

While I fully agree with the need for more pro bono work to be done by lawyers, I do not see how a compulsory stint in a legal aid bureau (whether run by the government or by the Bar Council) will achieve this in the absence of a genuine change of attitude among lawyers, and not so much law graduates.

Yes, there is always going to be a few law graduates out there for whom the profession is only going to be about minting money as quickly as possible. But the vast majority of graduates, I'd like to believe, genuinely would like to help, but find that it is not encouraged once they get into law firms (surprise, surprise!).

Many firms do not believe in the importance of doing pro bono work (some firms regard it as a waste of chambering students' time!) and those who are willing to allow juniors to engage in pro bono work do sometimes view it as nothing more than a chance to have a different dish for lunch, as it were.

In other words, the under-privileged members of society, who rely on legal aid lawyers to assist them, may simply be getting a lawyer out to get some experience in a field of law he or she has no or little experience (usually the case with crime) or just to get some practice.

Senior lawyers need to be committed to legal aid and pro bono work. They need to set an example for their juniors and chambering students and let them understand that legal aid work is about giving something back to society on the one hand, but more importantly, it is about upholding the values of the profession in which one has chosen to enter: justice and fairness for all, not just those who can afford the retainer fees.

Another contributing factor, I believe, to the reluctance in young lawyers to undertake pro bono work is that many who have had a taste of litigation or court appearances find it distasteful.

Distasteful not because they find it demeaning or beneath them to represent the less fortunate members of society, but distasteful due to the disgraceful level to which the system of criminal justice has been permitted to deteriorate. Hours on end waiting for mention after mention while the prosecution dawdles; late court starts; magistrates who could do with refresher courses on procedure and the law, etc.

Anyone who has ever witnessed legal aid representatives do 'dock briefs' will realise what a sham and farce it is — chambering students (you don't even get a real lawyer, for heaven's sake) huddled at lock-ups, taking down details of the accused to provide mitigation for them, hoping to garner some information about the 'clients' in the measly five minutes that they may be allocated, depending on the whims of the prisons department and when the prisoners arrive in the lock-up.

They then deliver a mitigation which, should they have failed to truly appreciate their client's case in the ridiculously short period of time they are given to gain details of their client's personal life and criminal offence, will be so standard, it's questionable even if the magistrate bothers to listen.

Some chambering students, who have their legal aid timed so that they have not yet reached the six-month period required to enable them to make court appearances, will simply spend their legal aid service taking down details or watching mitigations from the bench.

And we wonder why some chambering students find legal aid something they never want to return to.

The truth is that the work that chambering students do in Bar Council-sanctioned legal aid is, with the very minor exception of the dock brief programme, work that should be done by second- or third-year law students, not chambering students. Chambering students are capable of doing much more than interviewing accused persons or calling up lawyers to try to find one to take on a case.

My own personal experience with legal aid as a chambering student was that chambering students were treated to ridiculous lectures that were highly patronising in nature (and a huge waste of time) and some of the programmes could definitely have been better structured or better thought out, and certainly, run a lot more professionally.

Some of the programmes in my time, included going to court hearings to conduct watching briefs, which most chambering students freely admitted they simply went along to 'kill time' and some even managed to watch VCDs on laptop computers while the hearings dragged on. This is what the Bar Council calls 'legal aid'.

Admittedly, some law graduates without interview or client contact skills would greatly benefit from doing legal aid, but then again, interview skills, telephone skills, etc. — these should all also be learnt in the course of one's chambering at a law firm.

In areas like criminal law, where the need for lawyers is the greatest, I see no reason why chambering students should not be permitted to actually conduct a magistrate's court hearing or follow a case through from interview to representation, in the final three months of their chambering.

In the civil justice arena, legal aid bureaus, offering advice to anyone who comes through the door, is probably the only programme that has a real impact on the public and should be conducted more widely, publicised better and given a better structure, with chambering students working actual cases (such as researching the law or assisting pro bono lawyers write briefs, etc.). Chambering students are capable of much, much more — but the legal aid programmes aren't interested.

Compulsory legal aid for anything will not solve the problem of access to justice if the flaws of the present legal aid system are not thoroughly examined. The fact is that access to justice in this country has not been the subject of a thorough inquiry and examination (unlike the UK, where the Woolf Report has been instrumental in prompting constant and regular examination of access to justice and which, incidentally, is invariably mentioned in most first-year law classes) and should be done before any reforms regarding compulsory legal aid service are even considered.

We need better mechanisms for less privileged members of society to gain representation and justice but before we do that, the powers that be need to understand the intricacies of the system beneath them.

Making anything compulsory never achieves its stated aim. Better access to justice begins with recognition from the profession that pro bono work is important. It begins with making legal aid meaningful to chambering students so that they will see its value.

If legal aid is to work in this country, it needs to be better structured, better thought out and better designed to make it easy for lawyers to participate and make small contributions — doing legal aid need not be about representing someone in a case — two hours spent in a legal aid centre can mean helping someone decipher the legalese on a letter, allowing them to realise their rights as a consumer or member of the public and even helping them gain compensation for a wrong by writing a useful letter.

A final note: a great deal of carping has been taking place among various senior members of the legal fraternity about what law graduates should be made to do after they have graduated. I presume this simply has to do with the fact that a revamp of the Certificate in Legal Practice following last year's scandal is ongoing and all and sundry would like to throw in their five cents' worth into the pot, forgetting of course that too many cooks often spoil the soup beyond consumption.

What has been most embarrassing about a number of the comments made is they reflect a deep ignorance of what chambering students and CLP students have been doing on their courses all this time. The Bar Council president adds his two cents' worth that law graduates need to be given a good grounding in ethics at the CLP level, forgetting perhaps that under the CLP, it was one of the five papers CLP candidates must sit for. The AG then throws in his three cents by remarking that law graduates need to be more involved in pro bono work, forgetting also perhaps that a compulsory legal aid session that must be done by all chambering students before they can be called to the Bar.

What unfortunately will emerge out of this whole affair, no one knows. What is dire about the situation however is that senior members of the legal fraternity, whose influence no doubt goes some way in the eyes of the public, make ignorant remarks about how the CLP and chambering system should be changed, without realising what creature it is in the first place.

And perhaps, therein lies the problem we have with all that is wrong with the legal system.