No Win No Fee and Your Lawyer

Idealism
If all kinds of No Win No Fee lawyers were equally sympathetic and just, then there would really be no need to discriminate among the many lawyers on the market today. Rather, any claimant would be represented well by his solicitor even without much prompting on his part, either financially or morally, for the simple reason that his lawyer would be motivated by the intrinsic goodness of pursuing justice alone. Moreover, there would also be no conflict between many lawyers in this case because no lawyer would accept a case once he sees that it does not really contain any merit or that the prospective client facing him was the guilty party all along. In short, the legal world would not be in as shaky as foundation as it is now and it would be removed of the many academic earthquakes that frequently shock its disputations.

But this is not the case. And so, as a claimant it is incumbent upon you to choose well who you will hire as your representative. It might not be a completely impertinent idea to suggest here that of all the lawyers you meet, you should avoid hiring those who you think are too idealistic and unable to get their hands dirty. The real world is far from ideal. To hire someone who can function only in an ideal world is to hire someone incapable of handling the real.

Competitiveness
For many people, hard work is an absolute virtue. This is true, according to them, most especially when doing something intrinsically arduous or boring, such as demanding No Win No Fee. In line with the way many athletic companies portray this virtue in their numerous advertising materials, they think that without practicing hard every day and without pushing our personal limits to its maximum on a consistent basis, we would never be able to attain whatever it is that we are interested in accomplishing. To a certain extent, this view is correct. For no one would deny that energy and activity are the keys to progress, whether personal or social. Nevertheless, hard work is not an absolute good. In many cases, it may cause untold evil.

To begin with, limits must be had in working hard because our wills are not as strong as our bodies. Consistently working hard can injure our mind and our body because we can only handle so much punishment before we give in to illness and trauma. Second, it is not at all advisable to work hard when, just in demanding compensation, you find yourself not yet completely healthy. Hard work when moderated is a boon, but when overdone becomes a suicidal vice.

Law School Woes

No, I do not regret my decision to enter law school. My desire remains as strong as it was when I decided to become a lawyer after seeing how my parents were punished by the claiming process when they filed whiplash injury claims in the past. It just so happens that there are cases when law school life just becomes too much of a burden and that whatever I do to de-stress my life, nothing seems to work.

They said that your life will change in many ways when you decide to study to become a future barrister. But I never expected that it would demand this much change. I broke up with my girlfriend, I am perpetually broke, I have lost any sense of circadian rhythm, and I am on the verge of falling asleep every time I sit on something solid. There are many instances when I’ve asked myself why I chose to enroll myself into this unforgiving world. But then, again, I think of my parents, their broken whiplash injury claims, and I carry on.

One thing which makes life in law school hard really is the reading requirements. Simply speaking, it’s too much! You can expect to fill at least one bookshelf with the cases, annotations, codicils, and sample exams alone. This does not include the supplementary readings your teachers will obligate you to read, such as essays and books. Some say that you do not really need to read everything but just extract the gist from these texts. But how is that possible without reading them closely and seriously? You cannot really trust abstracts and digests to be right for the simple reason that they are not exhaustive.

And even if they were, your professor will know whether you’ve read the text or not because he will ask you not just what the main gist is, but how the author came to support that main gist. Nor will your professors care about you. Our professors once made my class read a 250-page case about the religion clauses in some of our laws. We discussed it in just one day.