Article:I want my dad in court: What is taking so long?

Kaine Agary

When lawyers get together, they inevitably start to complain about one aspect of practice or another.  From the juniors who are not pulling their weight, to the clients who refuse to pay for services.  I can empathise.  When your commodity of trade is your intellect, people find it difficult to appreciate the value you place on it.  When you charge someone for assessing a situation and writing a report on it, they look at you as though you have gone mad, and you can see them mentally calculating and trying to justify why they should pay you the amount you are asking for, for generating a two-page report.  When a case has to go to court, some people equate the delays in the judicial process to the effectiveness of their lawyer and want their lawyer to be able to wave his magic wand and resolve their issue immediately.  At the end of the day, they may want to penalise their lawyer for taking too long in resolving a matter by withholding payment of their due fees.  It might help to understand the process and the structures that your lawyer must work within.

When you are faced with a dispute and, with the advice of your lawyer, decide to resolve the matter in court, the first thing that happens is the filing of an originating process, more commonly a Writ of Summons.  This is the first step in the process and from this point your lawyer has very little control of the judicial mechanisms that drive your matter from your complaint, as contained in the writ, to your day in court.   The other party must receive the originating process for the volley of processes to commence and your lawyer cannot serve the Writ (or any other originating process document) on the other party.  This must be done by a bailiff, who is an officer of the court who executes writs and serves processes.  Unfortunately, bailiffs have been known to take their time in serving these processes until they are ‘encouraged’ to do so.  But this is not a problem peculiar to Nigeria.  I have met lawyers from Ghana and Kenya who make the same accusations about bailiffs in their countries.  A lawyer friend from Ghana said, “They always seem to have one excuse or the other, when the truth of the matter is that they hardly ever serve on time unless they are given good ‘reason’ to.”