PETALING JAYA: The Bar Council has been urged to liberalise the archaic publicity rules governing lawyers due to the changed media landscape, its former chairman said.
Ragunath Kesavan said lawyers and legal firms could not openly promote their areas of legal expertise as the Legal Profession (Publicity) Rules 2001 were strict.
“The council must move with the times and relax the rules to be fair to all in the legal profession,” he told FMT today.
Ragunath, who led the Bar between 2009 and 2011, said this in response to lawyers using social media like Facebook and Twitter to inform the public of cases they had won in court.
He said there were big and established legal firms displaying clients’ testimonials on their website to escape running afoul of the rules.
“There is also a trend among firms who have deep pockets to use third parties to nominate them for awards in order for their ‘business’ to be recognised,” he said.
Ragunath said other aspects of the rules, such as the one allowing legal firms to share premises with accounting and auditing companies and having an exclusive entrance to the law firm, should also be looked at.
Lawyer Farhan Haziq Mohamed said a review of the rules was overdue as lawyers were creative when it came to using available social media platforms to, directly and indirectly, promote themselves and the legal work they do.
“Some come up with videos and organise live talks on current topics via social media to introduce themselves to the public,” he said, adding that their oratory skills may not match up with their legal and advocacy skills.
Farhan said lawyers were using social media platforms to look for clients to sustain their practices as the profession was becoming competitive with about 20,000 people in the industry.
Another lawyer, Jeyaseelan Anthony, said the public had a right to receive qualified and competent counsel in specific areas of law to represent them in legal proceedings.
“These days lawyers are more into specialisation. The public should have access to information for them to make a choice without being influenced by third parties,” he said.
He added that legal charges could be reduced when clients came in direct contact with lawyers as fees were inflated to pay middlemen like touts.
Anthony said other Commonwealth countries like Singapore, whose legal system was similar to Malaysia, had modified their rules on publicity and advertising.
FMT understands lawyers were emboldened to seek publicity following a Federal Court ruling in 2016 when it ruled that senior lawyer Muhammad Shafee Abdullah was not guilty of professional misconduct when he was interviewed by an English daily in 2009.
A five-member bench held that a lawyer could not have breached the rules if a third party like the media attributed laudatory remarks and statements about the person being interviewed. - FMT
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.