Rogelio Vinluan: 'It's difficult to be an honest lawyer'
Tuesday, 07 April 2009
Rogelio Vinluan, incoming president of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, talked to Newsbreak’s Marites Dañguilan Vitug about a range of issues including the state of the law profession and legal education. Excerpts from the candid interview below:
In a past survey in the Philippines on which profession is most trusted, the lawyer is way below, with the priest and journalist topping the list. Why is this so?
That seems to be universal. Shakespeare said, “Let’s kill all the lawyers.” An old joke goes that laboratory technicians prefer lawyers to guinea pigs in their experiments.
What is it about the profession that makes it controversial or sinister?
I don’t know how to explain the bad image of lawyers. I have a book titled Dracula Was a Lawyer, a collection of jokes. That shows that we have a bad public image. An American comedian, in a commencement speech, said that in a survey, lawyers even rank lower than garbage collectors.
The nature of the profession invites enemies.
Yes, because somebody has to lose in any case.
Are we becoming a litigious society?
We don’t have yet the proliferation of personal-injury cases, class suits for product liability, etc. But I think we’re heading towards that.
Are we producing too many lawyers?
We have many lawyers, about 50,000, but we only have a few good ones. We don’t have the data, but only a few really practice. Most go into business or join the government. The IBP should start gathering data on lawyers so we’ll have an accurate picture.
What’s wrong with our law curriculum?
It’s slanted toward passing the bar. Passing the bar is the measure of the quality of the graduates. That shouldn’t be the case.
What should it be slanted toward?
Look at the Yale and Harvard curricula. They include a myriad of non-bar related courses such as, for example, homosexuality and the law. Their idea is to offer courses that their students will not get after they graduate. When you graduate, then you review on your own for the bar.
So, in the US, the law students are thought how to think?
They’re more after identifying issues. Our exams [in Yale] allowed open books. We could even bring them to our dorms. They were not after any correct answer. There’s a lot of freewheeling discussion, not graded recitations.
Should there be a reorientation then?
Yes. Lawyers should be trained how to think, not to worry about the bar.
If you were to give advice to the young, would you encourage them to take up law?
I don’t think any of the children of my former UP professor who became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Ramon Aquino, became lawyers. When I asked him, he said that it’s because it’s difficult to be honest. Except for the fact that he was so loyal to Marcos, he was honest to the hilt.
Why is it hard to be honest as a lawyer? Because you have to interpret the truth in many ways?
It’s because you have to live with the system. The problem is corruption. If you want to win your cases, you have to live with the system. From the time our firm, ACCRA, was founded, up to now, we’ve been having this raging debate on what to do. If you file a case for a client and it goes to a corrupt judge, what do you do? That’s a problem. We have a group of lawyers who say that we should never get involved in corrupting a judge. Another group says our clients will suffer. So as a sort of compromise, we decided we should never get involved in corrupting a judge, we should never be the ones to hand the money or offer the bribe. If a case goes to a corrupt judge, we tell the client to deal with the judge. It’s up to them—we give them the contacts—who to talk to.
Has this worked?
It’s hard when the clients beg you and say they don’t know anybody. It’s really difficult to be honest.
With the increase in women lawyers, will the profession improve? Women are said to be more honest.
I doubt it if the profession will improve because of gender. It’s really the system.
As incoming IBP president, what is the one big thing you want to do?
Improve the selection of judges. The IBP should be actively involved in the evaluation of applicants, especially to the Court of Appeals and the SC. We’re not at all active now although we have a representative in the JBC (Judicial and Bar Council). The American Bar Association has a committee that evaluates applicants and submits their evaluation to the Commission on Appointments. In our case, we should have a system. There should be a committee composed of lawyers of probity and we should submit our evaluation to the JBC and let the public know how we evaluated them.
You do have a voice in the JBC. But there appears to be no strong link to the IBP.
Yes, the IBP representative is on his own, he doesn’t even consult us. I intend to change this when I become president.
Does continuing legal education improve the state of lawyers?
Sad to say, many just attend lectures to comply, but they don’t even listen.
What’s wrong?
Based on studies in the US, those who benefit from the continuing legal education program are those who are already competent and highly motivated. In open forums, very few ask questions, and they ask questions about their cases. There should be some testing mechanism.
The IBP has been very vocal on national issues. Can lawyers be activists—like in Pakistan—since they are generally conservative?
Yes, of course. Many of our activists are lawyers.
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