A surfeit of lawyers

IN APPLYING the principles and formulas of the law, legal eagles like to talk about “the reasonable man in the street” or “the man in the omnibus” or “the man in the maxi taxi.”

So it must be something of a fall from grace for it to be revealed, as it was last week, that these days there are lawyers working as taxi drivers.

As she chaired a sitting of a parliamentary committee on finance and legal affairs, on Friday, attorney Hazel Thompson-Ahye remarked, “Some of them are driving taxis and doing all sorts of other things because they just can’t get jobs.”

It is a mark of hard times when, in a litigious society such as this one, even lawyers are having trouble finding work. But lawyers are not the only ones enduring a deep guava season.

It is no longer unusual to see professional people from all walks of life – teachers, musicians, police officers, national footballers – turning to taxi work in order to supplement their income or make the most of car ownership. In fact, long before all the talk of the “new normal,” ride-sharing applications, for all the questions about their legality, rose to prominence. Uber has come and gone, but a slew of local equivalents remain.

The rise of a generation of millennials, who understand work and careers in terms markedly different from generations prior, also underlines just how much things have changed.

While the Public Service remains behind the times in how it categorises positions and posts, the world has moved on. Indeed, the rise of contract work, for better or worse, reflects a flexible understanding of work.

But the same regimented thinking that suggests being a taxi driver is somehow “beneath” a lawyer, reflects a wider social perception that some professions are more respectable or more valuable than others.

There were 2,594 attorneys registered by the Law Association up to 2019. This is more than double the figure of lawyers in Estonia, a country with a population similar to TT’s.

“This traditional thing of people only being doctors or lawyers will not fly,” said Seenath Jairam, SC, a former president of the association, on Sunday.

The bias is worsened by wild disparities in pay. Lawyers these days regularly challenge the assumption that they earn lucrative fees, but it remains the case that what they charge exceeds the standards set for other important and noble professions: from law enforcement to the media.

We complain about too many people wanting to be lawyers, but we say little about why as a society we fail to properly compensate workers who perform functions that are of equal, if not more, social importance – teachers, for instance. Maybe now that the supply of lawyers so far outweighs the demand, priorities and values will change in the court of public opinion.