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 frompersonal involvement (as parties) in sale of land transactions, has generated a lot of controversy and apprehensivenesswithin and outside the Law Profession. This paper analyses that notion with a view to removing misplaced impressions andneedless misapprehensions capable of being used as strategies to further stifle the legitimate law practice and therebydenying lawyers reasonable personal participation in traditional law jobs, among which conveyancing, especially sale ofland, is key. The paper argues that outstretching the ruling in NBA v. Ibebunjo to deny honorable members of the professionpersonal participation in the sale of land transactions, would constitute an unjustified and unjustifiable misconception andhasty generalization in the absence of sound evidence indicating that every lawyer who gets personally involved in suchtransactions is likely to end up defrauding his or her client. To this end, the authors proffer a more realistic interpretationand application of the ruling to eschew internal muzzling of traditional law practice, considering the noticed illegitimate butsteady incursion into the law practice space by lawyers and non-lawyers from within and outside Nigeria. It is thereforeconcluded that a progressive approach to interpreting and applying the principles espoused in the ruling would accord morewith 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 forpresent 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 adoptingthe analytical and applied research approaches, the authors deployed a mixture of the doctrinal and the socio-legalresearch methodologies towards achieving more realistic results.