Stiff competition turning lawyers to rogues
29/05/2007 The Star

LAW practitioners and academicians said the recent spate of criminal breach of trust cases among lawyers was because of firms folding up and stiff competition, Utusan Malaysia reported.

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia law faculty lecturer Prof Salleh Buang said lawyers who swindled or committed CBT only accounted for less than 1% of the total registered lawyers in the country.

He said lawyers could have landed themselves in trouble because they were young, lacked experience or had set up their legal firms immediately after graduation.

This resulted in them seeking shortcuts to gain easy profit by cheating clients.

Prof Salleh was asked to comment on the 25 lawyers being sought by police to assist in some 200 swindling and CBT cases amounting to millions of ringgit.

Malaysian Muslim Lawyers’ Association president Datin Paduka Zaitoon Othman said one solution was to monitor law graduates who opened up their own firms.

The Government, she said, should tighten the rules to ensure that fresh graduates were not allowed to open their own firms without an experienced partner.

“It is impossible to manage a firm well without adequate experience. They (new graduates) are also still young and easily exposed to bad influence,” she said.