DELIMITING LAWYERS’ INVOLVEMENT IN SALE OF LAND IN LIGHT OF THE STEADY DIMINUTION OF THE LAW PRACTICE SPACE IN NIGERIA

Abstract

The notion that the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee has banned lawyers in active law practice in Nigeria from personal involvement (as parties) in sale of land transactions, has generated a lot of controversy and apprehensiveness within and outside the Law Profession. This paper analyses that notion with a view to removing misplaced impressions and needless misapprehensions capable of being used as strategies to further stifle the legitimate law practice and thereby denying lawyers reasonable personal participation in traditional law jobs, among which conveyancing, especially sale of land, is key. The paper argues that outstretching the ruling in NBA v. Ibebunjo to deny honorable members of the profession personal participation in the sale of land transactions, would constitute an unjustified  and unjustifiable misconception and hasty generalization in the absence of sound evidence indicating that every lawyer who gets personally involved in such transactions is likely to end up defrauding his or her client. To this end, the authors proffer a more realistic interpretation and application of the ruling to eschew internal muzzling of traditional law practice, considering the noticed illegitimate but steady incursion into the law practice space by lawyers and non-lawyers from within and outside Nigeria. It is therefore concluded that a progressive approach to interpreting and applying the principles espoused in the ruling would accord more with the position of law in Nigeria because Legal Ethics must operate within the extant laws of the larger society. Further, such approach would attune more to global trends, as well as lead to a pragmatic preservation of traditional law jobs for present and future generations of lawyers in Nigeria, conveyancing being a mainstay of law practice. The authors’ objectives in this research tilt towards a combination of the descriptive, the prescriptive and the normative. And adopting the analytical and applied research approaches, the authors deployed a mixture of the doctrinal and the socio-legal research methodologies towards achieving more realistic results