By Ndode N. Nkumbe
We commonly hear jokes made of lawyers that paint a veritable grim picture of persons of the learned profession. The jokes portray them as dishonest, materialistic, dubious, fraudulent and unrepentantly sinful among other derogatory epithets.
Although these light-hearted jokes offend nobody, they appear to carry the real perception of the public of lawyers. Listen to this little joke: a man was charged with murder. He would not hire a lawyer to help him in his defence. The State offered him the service of the most skilled criminal lawyer in the profession but he would not have him either.
After several failed attempts to persuade him to accept a lawyer, he was asked to explain his intransigence. He answered that he did not want a lawyer because he wanted to tell the truth! Was he subtly saying a lawyer will get him to tell a lie thereby echoing the other distorted homophone that makes a 'lawyer' sound like 'liar'?
Some people feel that when a lawyer gets into a matter, facts that hitherto were open automatically develop strictures; that lawyers usually know the truth but always elect to defend the wrong.
An example of lawyers' economy with the truth is cited of a famous murder case in Kumba in the late 1990s in which a defence lawyer was reported to have questioned if the head of the beheaded victim in a photograph was really the head of a human being or that of an ape. That unpopular line of defence had raised public uproar with the public convinced ever than before that telling the truth is not one of the virtues of lawyers.
Take this other joke. A housewife, an accountant and a lawyer were asked to give the answer to two plus two. Without thinking, the housewife said four; the accountant was not sure if the answer was three or four.
So he consulted his spreadsheet to be sure. The lawyer dimmed the lights and in a hushed voice asked the interrogator in the ear: 'what do you want the answer to be?' This is the type of lawyer we usually call smart. But after this smart stint, what impression does he leave on his trail? Does his client view him and the rest of the learned men as the true pillars of society or as unscrupulous rogues who can do anything for a fee?
Take this last one. A doctor vacationing in Mile Six Beach met an old lawyer friend and asked him what he was doing there. The lawyer replied, "Remember that lousy real estate I bought? Well, it caught fire, so here I am with the fire insurance proceeds. What are you doing here?" The doctor replied, "Remember that lousy real estate I had in Issokolo?
Well, the sea overflowed, and here I am with the flood insurance proceeds." The lawyer looked puzzled. "Gee," he asked, "how did you start the flood?" Is this an indictment to lawyers for fraud in order to feed their materialism?
Does that thirst for the good life add credence to this other story of a lawyer who lost an arm in a road accident while driving his newly acquired plush car? When a policeman met him lamenting the loss of his jaguar, he reminded him that his left hand was missing and that he was losing a lot of blood. "My Rolex!" the lawyer cried, caring more about the loss of his expensive watch than his missing hand.
Some people feel that lawyers are so materialistic that they have developed immunity to physical pain when the security of their temporal acquisitions is threatened. And for that intemperate love for earthly things the public believes they would not afford to look at God in the face on the last day and in shame, are buried with their face looking downward! So deplorable is the situation that when a lawyer arrived the gates of heaven he was given a crown for being the first in that profession to arrive there.
Although these are mere jokes, we cannot deny that they are closely tied to how the public perceives lawyers. The well-foundedness of these perceptions is a different issue. This is not what should preoccupy lawyers but how the perceptions came about.
Is it that lawyers are materialistic, dubious, fraudulent and dishonest? Lawyers will hastily answer these questions in the negative. Yet it is difficult to honestly affirm that lawyers are none of what they are portrayed to be in light-hearted jokes.
Lawyers therefore have a duty to build a positive image of themselves rather than dismiss the negative public perception of legal practitioners as misguided. When lawyers consistently conduct their business in a manner that depicts the best practices of the profession, this will go a long way to dispel the negative public perception of lawyers.
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