To everyone being called to the Nigerian Bar this year, congratulations. Becoming a lawyer in Nigeria is not a small achievement. It represents years of discipline, sacrifice, and the kind of perseverance that not everyone who begins the journey manages to sustain to the end. For many of you, this is the fulfilment of a dream that started long before law school. You earned this moment. Celebrate it properly.
And then, when the photographs have been taken and the celebrations have settled, I want to have an honest conversation with you about what comes next, because the profession you are entering does not always have this conversation with the people joining it, and I think that silence has cost too many talented young lawyers too much.
The Reality That Follows the Ceremony
Across many parts of Nigeria, it is not uncommon for young lawyers in their first years of practice to earn salaries that barely cover their transportation to work. Some earn ₦20,000 a month. Some earn ₦30,000 or ₦50,000, ₦70,000 etc. Others receive nothing at all, told that they are “still learning” and that experience, for now, is compensation enough. I have heard this framing so many times that it has almost become accepted doctrine; and acceptance, in this case, is the problem.
Nobody disputes that young lawyers have a great deal to learn. Every profession requires practical experience and mentorship, and the legal profession is no different. But the logic that treats learning and fair pay as mutually exclusive is one the profession has never properly examined. A young lawyer can be developing their skills and receiving a fair wage at the same time.
A lawyer can be mentored without their mentor treating their labour as free. The two things are not in conflict, they are simply being presented as if they were, and young lawyers who do not yet have the standing to push back are left to absorb the cost.
Many of those entering the profession this did not get here easily. Some worked their way through university under significant financial pressure. Some borrowed to fund their Law School fees. Some relied on family sacrifices that their families could not really afford to make. I know this because I lived a version of it myself, I worked on a construction site to raise some money to get to the Nigerian Law School, and I remember clearly what it felt like to arrive at the Bar after that kind of journey. The idea that having come through all of that, a young lawyer should enter employment conditions that make basic financial survival yet another battle, that should trouble us as a profession more than it appears to.
The Gap in the Conversation
The legal profession has, rightly, begun to take seriously the question of how lawyers charge for their services. The Legal Practitioners Remuneration Order 2023 has brought important national attention to the undervaluing of legal work, and the conversation around enforcing minimum professional fees is one I support. Legal services have genuine value, and that value should be reflected in what clients pay.
But there is a gap in that conversation that deserves equal urgency: if we believe legal services have value, then the lawyers delivering those services must also be valued, not only by their clients, but by the firms and practitioners who employ them. The remuneration conversation cannot be only about what clients owe lawyers. It must also be about what the profession owes the people within it.
Law firms should employ based on their honest financial capacity. If a firm can reasonably sustain and fairly pay one associate, then employing one associate well is a more responsible choice than employing three lawyers who cannot earn a living wage. Hiring more people than you can afford to pay is not generosity, it is the transfer of the firm’s resource problem onto people who are not yet in a position to refuse. The profession should be honest about this.
Young lawyers employed in firms and chambers should have written terms of engagement. They should know what they are being paid, when they will be paid, what is expected of them, and what they are entitled to. These are not unreasonable demands. They are the basic conditions of professional employment, and their absence, which is common enough to be treated as normal, reflects a gap in professional standards that the Nigerian Bar Association has not yet addressed with adequate seriousness.
What This Is Really About
This is not simply a salary conversation, though the salaries matter. It is a conversation about the dignity of legal practice and the long-term health of the profession. The conditions in which young lawyers begin their careers shape whether the best of them stay in practice, whether they can focus on serving their clients without the distraction of financial desperation, and whether the profession can honestly claim to attract and retain the talent that the administration of justice requires.
To the Nigerian Bar Association and the Legal Practitioners Remuneration Committee: this issue deserves to be on the agenda alongside the conversations already happening about professional fees. A national conversation about the welfare and fair remuneration of employed young lawyers, their right to written contracts, minimum pay floors, and basic employment protections is long overdue.
Congratulations again to every new wig. You are joining a profession with a proud history and a genuine capacity to do important work. My hope is that the profession you are entering becomes, through honest conversation and genuine reform, one that upholds justice not only in the courtrooms it serves, but within its own ranks.
You deserve nothing less than that. And neither does the profession.
