Category Archives: Obiter / News

Know Your Lawyer

I’m not talking about track record, competence, degree of confidence and the high level of trust that comes with the attorney-client relationship. Of course, these considerations are crucial because a client entrusts his properties, even his liberty and life, to the able hands of his lawyer.

What I’m referring to is something that I never imagined I would encounter. Only members of the Philippine Bar of good standing, or those who passed the bar exams (scheduled every September of each year) given by the Supreme Court and have taken the lawyer’s oath, may practice law (every lawyer is a compulsory member of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines). Only recently, we discovered that the opposing “counsel” in a criminal case is apparently not a lawyer (well, that’s what the certification from the Office of Bar Confidant stated). Continue reading

The Law Blog

The decision to put up a law blog did not come easy. The first and strongest argument against a legal blog is the formality that has come to be expected from anything that has to do with the practice of law, (i.e. dress codes, codes of conduct, rules of court and other codified rules of behavior). A blog, therefore, would appear to be an anathema to this strict and rigid environment where the observance of rules and protocols takes primacy.

The term “blog” itself (a contraction of the words “web log” to the cyber-challenged), in fact, speaks volumes about the kind of themes and environments one can expect from this evolution in internet communication. The general connotation, after all, is that a blog is, at its very core, an informal venue to share information. Blogs have in fact become sounding boards for the free exchange of ideas, sometimes even a venue for “selling” or in more politcally correct terms, “promoting” world views. At first blush, therefore, there appears to be two mutually exclusive ideas, the free-flowing-most-anything-goes world of bloggers and the highly “cannalized” or rule-bound world of lawyering where self-promotion is considered a mortal sin, on a head-on collision where in the end, there could be only one. Law students are taught that the law is a jealous mistress (or in deference to all things gender sensitive, its equivalent male term – jealous gigolo).

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