I don’t know why lawyers are an unloved lot, everywhere in the world. As a group, they must be ranking a close second to our dear sardarjis, as a butt of so many jokes. While I have heard many sardarjis narrate jokes about themselves, there are few lawyers who have developed this healthy habit of laughing at oneself. One possible reason for this ire that lawyers attract could be because half the population (those who have lost cases) always think that justice has not been meted out to them. This is similar to a batsman in cricket who is given L.B.W., but who always thinks that he wasn’t out. Not to be taken seriously but symptomatic of the hatred towards the “black coats” in that Mecca of individual freedom (yes, the U.S. of A.) was a conversation I had with a lawyer with whom I was staying. While escorting me to a destination in his car, he said, if at this moment a snake were to cross the road, an average American would stop and let it go but if it were a lawyer, people just wouldn’t bother.
Homespun wisdom also suggests that if an issue has to be expeditiously settled, courts should really be considered as a last resort. Why has such a well designed system, based on such time tested principles, come to such disrepute?? That “cerebral” people like the lawyers and others who are associated with this system have allowed things to come to such a pass, is even more distressing. If it is not a failure of the system, it has to be a managerial failure that could be the root cause of this mess. Let us try and list down the “ills” of our judicial system, as seen from the outside, by people like you and me.
The backlog is frightening.
Civil matters don’t get seriously considered for years (or is it decades?). One can’t help but be frightened at the inefficiency that must be plaguing the system. As a wag once said, if you want a quick hearing, nothing short of “murder” will do, and that too if the other party does not get a good lawyer. This is like a typical problem on the shop floor of any ordinary factory where the processing capacity of a particular workstation or a machine is far lesser than the desired output. Any manager worth his salt would take immediate steps to increase the throughput and reduce the backlog.
It is being done too slowly to have any meaningful effect. If the Andhra Pradesh CM can have a video conference with his collectors every morning, can we not, in a progressive state of Maharashtra at least, give those poor judges, computers to eliminate the dreary work, so that they can spend more time in handling more cases?? I shudder every time I hear the "beldaar" in those district courts shout out the names of clients who are to present themselves next, before the judge - could we not provide them with a decent public address system to reduce the chaos? And pray why should it take the official judgment copy so many weeks to reach the client or his lawyer?? In a commercial organization wedded to efficiency, the administrative manager would have been sacked for such ineptitude - alas there does not seem to be any manager here it all.
The more you think about it, my dear friends, the more it sounds like a management manual on what should not be done. I am convinced it is not a question of people inside the judicial system not understanding these basic facts- in fact understanding something by looking beyond the obvious and reading between the lines is what lawyers do to earn their bread - it is just that they are not exerting enough to set thing right. It is also difficult to believe that such brainy people would agree to perpetuate an inefficient environment around them (in spite of the lurking doubt that letting it remain like that makes commercial sense to them).
That’s leads us to the biggest impediment, Money, in carrying out any reforms to strengthen the system. A popular argument forwarded is that the government which is the real "manager" of the system does not have enough money to invest in efficiency enhancing policies and devices. To them my answer is to calculate the cost of all the inefficient things that are presently being done (let us just take the cost of man hours lost due to delays and postponements) and compare this figure with the value of investments required to eliminate these very inefficiencies. You do not have to be a financial wizard to conclude that the investments will fetch very high returns.
"Mr. Prakash Shesh, the author, has done his MBA from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad after his Masters in Physics from I.I.T. New Delhi. You may send your feedback to him by choosing an option at the top right corner of this page."