I am not the type of person who would put somebody off going into the field of law. I, after all, was told by a then girlfriend’s stepmother, some 20 years ago, that I was going into a field where there were no jobs and I would have no chance of being successful. I think somebody that is hardworking and motivated – and that is by an objective perspective and not necessarily their own opinion, will always succeed in almost any field, but I do have to say that whereas when I entered the profession there were approximately 10 000 attorneys in South Africa, and it was already getting crowded, now that we have about 30 000, the field is very crowded. Sitting on the Law Society I have seen attorneys who got themselves into trouble because they genuinely cannot afford to pay their accountant R2 000,00 to audit their trust account, attorneys who turn up at proceedings of the Law Society advising that they have hitchhiked to get to the Law Society and I feel terribly sorry for those who are in the profession and trying as hard as they can, but simply cannot make ends meet.

It will only get tougher as law schools pump out more and more entrants into the profession here and in overseas countries – basically overselling law degrees. By the same token, I get e-mails from prospective candidate attorneys who explain to me their credentials, or because I have written articles on my blog and on my website about obtaining candidate attorneys, they berate me, or presumably attorneys in general, for not reading their CV’s properly. What they fail to understand is that between the hundreds of other e-mails every attorney gets each day, are one or two applications a day from people who want to do their articles at the firm and who do not understand that a firm is limited, by the number of directors it has who have five or more years experience, to no more than three candidate attorneys at a time. It goes without saying that a firm with lots of directors can then take on many candidate attorneys, provided those directors have been directors for five years or more. Smaller firms are limited and generally have to wait until somebody graduates as an attorney, before they can make that position available and by the time that position becomes available, the same people who feel you have not given enough time to their CV, simply do not understand that you would have received more than 1 000 CV’s in that time.

It is a very tough profession, it is extremely hard to get your foot in the front door, and perhaps when you are looking for articles, if you cannot get into the specialised field where you are looking, as some people have written to me, you will need to look at other positions as a candidate attorney. In other words, if you just want to do intellectual property law, but there are no positions available at any of the firms you have applied for, you may have to consider taking a position at any firm, and doing whatever work they do, for a year or two and then move onto something else. I, for example, did not do any personal injury work during my articles when I worked for an attorney who specialised in insolvency law and divorce litigation at that time, although he subsequently stopped doing family law. It was the first position I was offered, I grabbed it with both hands then, 18 years ago and it was certainly easier to get articles than it is now – but I was not going to be fussy and it turned out to be a fantastic learning opportunity for me.