A while ago, Metalex Legal submitted a formal petition to the Nigerian Bar Association, the Legal Practitioners Remuneration Committee, and the relevant national authorities. The petition raised specific, structured legal questions about the authority of NBA branches in implementing the Legal Practitioners Remuneration (For Business, Legal Services and Representation) Order 2023. It cited the Legal Practitioners Act, engaged the text of the Order directly, and requested authoritative national guidance on practices we believed exceeded what the law permits.
That petition has not been acknowledged or addressed.
We are therefore taking a further step. The questions we raised have not gone away, and the practices we identified have not stopped. If anything, new information reaching us about what is happening across some NBA branches in the name of implementing the Remuneration Order makes those questions more urgent than when we first raised them. We are now placing them before the widest possible audience, because the lawyers affected by these practices deserve clarity, and clarity should come from the law rather than from institutional silence.
The Nigerian Bar Association has always positioned itself as a guardian of the rule of law. The questions that follow are an invitation to demonstrate that commitment within its own house.
1. Question One: Can a Branch Committee Legally Try and Fine a Lawyer?
Some NBA branches have constituted committees with the specific mandate of investigating and trying lawyers alleged to have charged less than the ten percent prescribed by the Remuneration Order for land documentation and property transactions. These committees conduct hearings. They reach findings. And where they find a lawyer "guilty," they impose financial penalties, some of which are reported to run as high as five million naira.
The Legal Practitioners Act is clear on this subject. Disciplinary jurisdiction over legal practitioners in Nigeria is vested in the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee. The LPDC is a statutory body with defined powers, defined procedures, and defined sanctions. It operates under rules of natural justice: a lawyer facing allegations before the LPDC is entitled to know the case against them, to present their defence, and to be heard by a properly constituted body acting under clear legal authority.
A branch committee constituted by a branch executive resolution is none of these things. It is not a statutory body. It has no jurisdiction conferred by the Legal Practitioners Act. It cannot lawfully try a legal practitioner for professional misconduct, because that jurisdiction belongs to the LPDC and to the LPDC alone. The fact that the alleged misconduct is charging below the prescribed fee, rather than some other form of professional failing, does not change the constitutional position. The question of what sanction follows professional misconduct, and what process determines that sanction, is governed by statute, not by branch resolution.
When a branch committee tries a lawyer and imposes a fine of five million naira, two things are happening simultaneously. First, a body without jurisdiction is purporting to exercise power that the law places elsewhere. Second, a financial penalty of significant magnitude is being imposed on a professional through a process that does not have the legal authority to impose it. If a government agency did this, we would call it what it is: an exercise of power without legal authority. The fact that the body doing it is a professional association does not change the analysis.
If the Legal Practitioners Act vests disciplinary jurisdiction in the LPDC, on what legal authority does a branch committee try a lawyer, reach a finding, and impose a fine of five million Naira?
2. Question Two: What Process Protections Apply in These Branch Proceedings?
Beyond the question of who is conducting these proceedings is the question of what procedural protections, if any, the lawyers facing them are being afforded.
The right to fair hearing is not a courtesy. It is a constitutional guarantee under Section 36 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The right to know the case against you, to have adequate time to prepare a defence, to be heard by an impartial tribunal, and to have the decision explained by reference to the evidence and the applicable standard, these are not technical procedural niceties. They are the substance of justice.
When a branch committee conducts what amounts to a summary trial of a lawyer for an alleged breach of the Remuneration Order, the specific procedural protections that apply are not clearly defined in any instrument we have been able to identify. There is no publicly available framework setting out how evidence is gathered, what the standard of proof is, whether the lawyer is entitled to be legally represented, how the findings are recorded, and what right of appeal exists against an adverse finding. In the absence of these protections, what is described as a disciplinary proceeding is more accurately described as an administrative determination with punitive consequences, conducted by a body whose authority to conduct it is itself in question.
The Legal Practitioners Act is precise about what a proper disciplinary process looks like. The standards it establishes are not bureaucratic obstacles. They exist because the consequences of a finding against a legal practitioner can be severe, both financially and professionally, and because the person facing those consequences deserves the protection that a proper process provides. Branch committees that bypass those standards are not enforcing the law. They are conducting proceedings that the law does not authorise.
What is the standard of proof in a branch committee proceeding? Is the lawyer entitled to legal representation? What right of appeal exists? And if none of these are defined, how is the constitutional right to fair hearing being protected?
3. Question Three: Is It Legal to Mandate That Professional Fees Be Paid to an NBA Branch Account?
Some NBA branches have issued resolutions requiring that professional fees for property transactions be paid not to the lawyer who performed the work, but to a branch account. The lawyer does not receive payment directly from the client. The money is processed through the branch's financial system before reaching the practitioner.
The question is simple: under what provision of the Legal Practitioners Act, the Remuneration Order, or any other instrument of Nigerian law is this arrangement authorised?
We have examined both instruments carefully. We have identified no such provision. The Remuneration Order regulates the amount a lawyer is entitled to charge. It creates the financial relationship between the practitioner and the client. It does not create an intermediary role for the NBA branch in that relationship, and it does not authorise any branch to receive professional fees on behalf of practitioners and administer them. Paragraph 11 of the Order, which is the provision that addresses branch-level enforcement, delegates the investigation of complaints to branches. Investigation of complaints is not the same as financial administration of professional fees. These are categorically different functions, and only one of them has been delegated.
The professional fee is the property of the lawyer who earned it. It vests in the practitioner upon performing the work that the Order prescribes the fee for. No instrument of Nigerian law that we have identified authorises a branch to hold that fee in its own account, to process it through its own financial systems, or to make decisions about when and how it is remitted to the practitioner.
When a branch receives a professional fee that belongs to a lawyer and administers it through the branch's accounts, the money is not in the lawyer's control. The lawyer who has performed the work and generated the fee has no guarantee of when it will be remitted, under what conditions, or in what amount. This is not an administrative arrangement. It is an interposition of a third party into a legal relationship that the law did not create that third party to occupy.
Under which specific provision of the Legal Practitioners Act or the Remuneration Order 2023 is an NBA branch authorised to receive professional fees belonging to a legal practitioner and administer them through the branch's own financial accounts?
4. Question Four: Can an NBA Branch Legally Deduct a Percentage of a Lawyer's Professional Fees?
The question that has generated the strongest response among practitioners we have spoken to is this: several NBA branches are retaining a percentage of the professional fees they receive before remitting the remainder to the lawyer. The percentages reported to us range from two to ten percent of the prescribed ten percent fee. In other words, a lawyer who should receive the full ten percent prescribed by the Remuneration Order receives less, because the branch has taken a cut.
We want to state this precisely: if a client pays ten percent of a property transaction value as the prescribed professional fee, and that money passes through a branch account from which the branch retains a portion before remitting the rest to the lawyer, then the lawyer receives less than the fee the Order entitles them to. Not because the client underpaid. Because the branch deducted its share first.
The Remuneration Order was enacted to protect lawyers from being underpaid. A system that routes professional fees through an intermediary which then deducts a percentage before the lawyer receives them is not implementing the Order. It is undermining it. The mechanism designed to ensure lawyers receive fair compensation is being used to create a channel through which a portion of that compensation is extracted before it reaches them.
We are not making allegations of criminal conduct against any individual. We are identifying a structural arrangement that, on its face, has no legal basis and that produces an outcome directly contrary to the purpose of the instrument it claims to implement.
The question the Nigerian Bar Association must answer is straightforward: on what legal authority does any branch deduct a percentage of a lawyer's professional fees before remitting them? Not on what moral or institutional grounds such a deduction might be justified, but on what specific provision of law it is based. If such a provision exists, we ask that it be identified. If it does not, then the practice must stop.
The Remuneration Order was enacted to ensure lawyers receive fair professional fees. If a branch deducts two to ten percent of that fee before remitting the balance to the lawyer, on what legal basis does that deduction rest, and how is the purpose of the Order being served?
5. Question Five: Can a Branch Legally Withhold a Lawyer’s Professional Fees for Up to a Year?
A further practice reported to us by lawyers across some NBA branch is that branches are withholding portions of the professional fees they collect for periods of up to one year, with the stated justification of deterring kickback arrangements between lawyers, property agents, and clients.
We understand the concern that animates this practice. The kickback problem is real, and we have written about it. Arrangements in which a lawyer routes the nominal ten percent through the required channel and then privately rebates a portion to the agent or client are a genuine ethical problem that undermines the purpose of the Order.
But the response of withholding a lawyer's professional fees in a branch account for twelve months is not a legal solution to this problem. It is, again, an exercise of power for which we can identify no statutory authority. The branch is not a regulatory body. It has not been granted the power to impose a holding period on professional fees. The lawyer who has performed the work and earned the fee has a right to receive it. Withholding it for any period, for any reason, requires authority that the law either confers or does not. And the law, as far as we have been able to determine, does not confer this authority on any branch.
If the NBA believes that a mechanism for deterring kickbacks is necessary as part of implementing the Order, that mechanism should be designed at the national level, through a proper policy instrument, with defined legal basis, clear procedural protections for practitioners whose fees might be affected, and a genuine accountability framework. A branch-level arrangement that holds a lawyer's professional income in an account for a year, without any of these protections, is not a policy. It is an improvisation with someone else's money.
What provision of Nigerian law authorises a branch to hold a legal practitioner's professional fees in a branch account for twelve months? And if the practitioner needs those funds before the twelve months elapse, what recourse do they have?
6. Question Six: NBA Branches Have Generated Millions of Naira. Who Is Accountable for That Money?
One of the facts that makes these questions most urgent is one that has received little public attention: some NBA branches have generated millions of naira through the percentage deductions they have been taking from practitioners' professional fees.
This is not a hypothetical. Branch-level remuneration arrangements have been in place across multiple states for a significant period, and the volume of property transactions processed through branch accounts in that time has been substantial. At two to ten percent of ten percent of significant property transaction values, across hundreds or thousands of transactions, the sums accumulated are considerable.
The questions this raises are not only about legality. They are about accountability. Where is this money? Who has custody of it? How is it managed? What accounting records are maintained? Who has the right to information about it? What happens to it if the branch's approach is found to have exceeded its legal authority? Is any of it recoverable by the lawyers from whose fees it was deducted?
These are not unreasonable questions. They are the basic questions that any responsible system of financial governance requires answers to. And the absence of any publicly available framework that addresses them is itself an answer of sorts: there is no proper governance structure, because the arrangement itself was never within the proper scope of branch authority to begin with.
Where is the money collected through percentage deductions from practitioners' professional fees? Who has custody of it, who audits it, under what legal framework is it held, and what happens to it if the arrangement is found to have had no legal basis?
The Bigger Picture: A Profession That Must Hold Itself to Its Own Standards
What this situation demonstrates, taken as a whole, is the cost of implementing a significant legal instrument without first establishing clear national standards for how that implementation should occur.
The Remuneration Order 2023 introduced important reforms. The need for those reforms was real. But the implementation has been left largely to individual branches, without a clear national framework defining the limits of branch authority, the procedural requirements for enforcement, the accountability mechanisms for any funds collected, and the relationship between branch-level activity and the statutory functions of the LPDC and the national Remuneration Committee.
The result is a landscape of differing practices across the country, some of which are within the law and many of which, on our analysis, are not. Lawyers in different states are operating under materially different conditions. Some are subject to branch committees that try them and fine them. Others are not. Some have their professional fees routed through branch accounts with percentage deductions. Others do not. The profession that is supposed to be governed by uniform national standards is, in the matter of remuneration enforcement, governed by whatever approach the local branch has adopted.
This is not a criticism of any individual branch chairman or any individual branch official. Many of the people implementing these frameworks believe they are doing the right thing for the profession. The problem is institutional, not personal. The problem is that the NBA has not established the national clarity that would prevent well-intentioned branch-level improvisation from producing legally problematic outcomes.
We are asking for that clarity. We are asking for it publicly because our formal petition did not produce it. And we are asking with the specific expectation that the answer will be grounded in what the law actually says, not in what any branch has found administratively convenient.
Nigeria normalises abnormality slowly, and then all at once. Practices that would be immediately challenged in any other institutional context are absorbed into the routine of professional life because they are presented by people in authority and because challenging them feels more difficult than accepting them. The legal profession, of all institutions, should be the one most resistant to this pattern. We know what due process requires. We know what statutory authority looks like. We know what it means when a body exercises power it was not given.
The questions in this article deserve answers. The lawyers affected by these practices deserve the clarity that answers would provide. And the profession deserves an implementation of the Remuneration Order that is as lawful as the standard it is trying to enforce.
When will the Nigerian Bar Association and the Legal Practitioners Remuneration Committee provide clear, nationally binding guidance on what NBA branches are and are not authorised to do in implementing the Remuneration Order 2023?
At Metalex Legal, we believe what the law says is the most important thing. Not what is administratively convenient. Not what has become customary. Not what is presented as honourable by those who benefit from it. If a practice or procedure is not in compliance with the law, or contravenes it, it is wrong, regardless of who is implementing it and regardless of how long it has been happening.
We are raising these questions as lawyers who believe the profession deserves better than the normalisation of practices that would not survive serious legal scrutiny. We will continue raising them until they receive the answers they deserve.
