WHY LAW?
Oyin Alakija: “My name is Oyinkan Alakija. I’m a lawyer, managing partner at Gresyndale Legal, which is a corporate commercial firm. The head office in Lagos, providing sound legal advice to our clients and I guess my pathway to law has been an interesting one especially as a female lawyer. I picked up just a couple of mentors along my way so I’m very excited today to introduce you sir, as a mentor, someone I have also been able to get a lot of personal advice on legal matters especially. So just a quick introduction, Mr. Muhammad Dele Belgore is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, legal luminary, and one of the founding partners of Sofunde Osakwe Ogundipe & Belgore, and I’m excited to introduce you to everyone here and excited for you to join me on this ride today. Thank you sir.
Dele Belgore: “Thank you very much Oyinkan, it’s my enormous pleasure to be here”
Oyin Alakija: “Thank you. So, I wanted to ask, maybe I could start with asking you why law, why you decided to go down the path of law.”
Dele Belgore: “Well actually yeah a natural thing for most people to think is because I come from a family of lawyers and judges, that law was just a natural step for me. It wasn’t. I actually wanted to be a landscape architect, but that didn’t work because my dad will have none of it. He called it derogatory. He says “so you in other words you want to be a gardener?”. I held my ground and I said “listen you can’t tell me what to do what to study”. He says yes, but at the same time I cannot force him to pay fees for something he doesn’t believe in so we had a standoff and then after a few months I sort of gave in. But he never he never ever told me to study law but the moment landscape architecture was off the table it just seemed natural that I gravitate to law. So that’s how come I became a lawyer.”
Oyin Alakija: “Thank you. Even I didn’t know. That’s really interesting to know and I think the legal juices were already showing forth with that debate with your dad”.
Before Becoming A Partner in A Law Firm
Oyin Alakija: “And how about for lawyers who decide to grow organically within the firm? If someone wanted to be a partner, what would the partners be looking for in any of the law firms. What would, you know, because again, these would already be established partners and somebody else coming in to join the ranks. So, what would the partners be looking at before deciding if to give someone a seat at the table?”
Dele Belgore: “Well, for me, and I say this to, lawyers, junior lawyers all the time, see yourself as a service provider. Clients come to you with a problem and they want you to provide a solution. And, the client is not interested in, “oh, the Supreme Court said this in this case, the, section 2 85 of Karma, this is what he provides”. The client doesn’t really want to know that. It’s useful for you to know that it’s good academic exercise and you can deal with all of that in house but, the client has a problem and he wants to get from A to B okay? Look at the most effective way in which you can get him from A to B. And if that is your thinking, then you are thinking in the right way for a partner. Because if you are just somebody who you get the work, you apply immediately, you start bringing your legal skills “so this is what the law is, this is what the law says”, and you can be actually very busy and effective, but are you delivering the service? So always put yourself in the position of the client receiving your service so that therefore you’re looking at yourself as a service provider and you’re seeing the law profession as a service. That to me, when you are thinking that way, you are partner material.
Okay? It is not just about, “oh, this guy’s a very good clever lawyer”. If you are a very clever lawyer, then somebody will be happy to employ you on very good terms. But you want to know that you’re seeing it as a business and you can move the practice forward”.
Oyin Alakija: “I think some lawyers feel it’s just about bringing in clients and, maybe that’s why you find some young lawyers who have good networks leaving too early. They leave the law firm too early, go and start their own practice, but they haven’t gotten a full understanding or knowledge base of the law itself, and they think they can hire someone to provide the service, not realizing that most problems don’t come out in easy equations. You actually have to, get the problem and have to work out what the mathematical equation is first before you can solve it”.
Dele Belgore: “Quite aside from that, the thing is, when you’re undercover of a law of an established practice, what you’re able to do there doesn’t automatically translate to you doing the same thing when you’re your own. For instance, I may be very well connected, but I have a big name behind me, then, I can use that connection to bring in the work.
Now, if I then get carried away and say, “oh, I’m bringing in all this work to this firm, let me go set up my own”, those same clients, would they be willing to come to me when they know that I don’t have this established and experienced name behind me supporting it? We sometimes lose sight of that, and it’s, very, important”.
Oyin Alakija: “Because it’s true. I think it’s also similar to banks. You might have an amazing accounts officer, but you also like the facilities a certain bank is providing and they moved to another bank but it is smaller, you might not have as much trust in the establishment behind the person and you just leave your account where it is”.
What to Do Before Starting A Law Firm
Oyin Alakija: “I think one of the hardest thing, that I found personally, is as a young lawyer working, maybe in a law firm or thinking about starting your own law firm and you’re someone who started your own law firm, how do you decide what to do? Do you start your own law firm, or do you try and make partner in a law firm?”
Dele Belgore: “The landscape today is totally different to the time that we started in 1985. Today, there are much more law firms, legal practice is a lot more competitive. At the, the time that we, started our partnership in 1989, it was one of the very few partnerships in Nigeria. The normal run of things is that you had a sole proprietorship. A certain person had his own law practice, and you know, that sort of thing, and you, employed your lawyer. So, the concept of a partnership at that time, was new to us in Nigeria. We were not the first ones, I would say. I’m not saying by any means that were the first ones, but they were very few, you could count them on your fingertips. Today, given the complexity of practice, given the competition, I think I do not believe, strongly, that there is much room for a sole proprietorship. You got to team up with colleagues, share experiences, share competence. There’s got to be synergy to move forward. But even before that, I think there should be some form of grounding. You know, in the military they have a saying that, in order to command, you must first learn how to serve.
So I think for any young lawyer, I would say start as an employee first, and see how that goes. One, you’re learning from people who are senior to you, aside from learning the movements of the lawyer and also learning how you would be an employer, run a law practice. So, it’s a slow burn. I don’t think it’s something you can just come by overnight and, just say you are ready to go. I think it’s a slow burn”.
Oyin Alakija: “Thank you for that. I think that’s really interesting that at the time you started the partnership, there were very few partnerships in, Nigeria. That’s really interesting. I had no idea”.
Dele Belgore: “Oh, there were very few. I’m sorry to cut in. And if I may also add, aside from the fact there was very few, there was also this feeling that partnerships don’t work in Nigeria. Because the few that have come before us didn’t work. The partnership broke up within a very short time of their formation. So, there was this thinking that partnerships don’t work. I remember a lot of people were saying to me when we were about to start, “why do you want to do a partnership? They don’t work in Nigeria”. And speaking with my colleagues, Mr. Sofunde, Chief Osakwe, Mr. Ogundipe, they also had people telling them this same thing at the time”.
How do we make Partnership work
Oyin Alakija: “How do we make partnerships work? For lawyers who do decide maybe, after some time, paying their dues they want to join a partnership or form a partnership, what would you say the key qualities to making it work are because you have one of the most successful Partnerships that exist in the legal field today. So, what would you say is the key to making it work?”
Dele Belgore: “Well, at first, I would say look for a partner in which you share a common objective. By a common objective, a partner who agrees with you on how you have a vision on the kind of law practice you want to create and your ideas gel. For instance, in this business, there’s some lawyers who believe, and I’m not saying they’re wrong, that the bottom line is how much you put in your pocket. So, their model is pay low salaries, pay very low rent, just get your office somewhere where the rent is nothing, and keep your overheads exceedingly low. They’re not interested in fancy offices, and they probably operating at a rudimentary level. So, when they earn a fee, maybe less than 10 percent of that actually goes towards running their office. The idea is that they keep as much of it for themselves.
Of course, the other way is that you first have to invest heavily in this outfit, and in which case you are carrying strong overheads and then you believe that that investment is then what will bring you the work and gradually you get the work and your overheads tend to
reduce. So, if you want to form a partnership and you are talking to somebody with a different mindset, you are probably on the wrong footing from the outset so there has got to be some meeting of minds on that.
Secondly, you you’ve got to understand then when you are picking your partner, pick somebody, perhaps, that has skill sets that you don’t have, or maybe, you have, but you don’t really have time to work on. There is no point, absolutely no point, in replicating yourself, so there’s got to be a difference. Each person has got to be able to bring something in and it is that combination that is a group.
Thirdly, you go to then accept that once you have the common objective, you’re going to have different ways of doing things and it’s very important. Before we started, the group that I’ve ended up with were not the only ones I was talking to. But I remember I was talking to some other group but I noticed that we had this guy who very enthusiastic, full of full of ideas and he made very good points and he’ll be good to have as a partner. But we all noticed that when he made a suggestion and you didn’t accept it, he tended to lose interest. So, we clearly felt that this guy is not partnership material because in a partnership you get a situation where I would do something different to the way you would do it, doesn’t mean I should condemn it, as long as the overall objectives are the same. I think those are the key fundamentals that you want to do you want to look at before you commit to a partnership”.
Women In Law, Listen To This
Oyin Alakija: “Where do you see female involvement in legal practice? Growing up, law was very much an old boys club and dominated by men in the field. Do you encourage them to stay? And what do you say about female participation in the years to come?”
Dele Belgore: “Well, let’s look at it this way, for litigation, there are a number of factors that maleate against, females. If you do active litigation in which involves you traveling, the male counterpart finds it a bit easier and it’s a bit more convenient, for him to do that, because, you have a case somewhere outside of Lagos, they’re probably going to be staying in a hotel that you’re not sure of, you’re going to be in an environment where you probably know no one, you’re just booking your hotel, getting car hire and things like that. Those kind of things could be daunting, for females, and therefore some institutions, and I would say that we, for instance, didn’t send female lawyers to go do cases outside Lagos, in remote parts. We will do in a place like Abuja, because we know they are established and safe, with comfortable hotels, transportation. But we won’t send them to some other places. In that regard, the male counterpart is probably doing more of that kind of work and that has affected a lot of women in for litigation. For non-litigation work, I think it’s fairly even. The opportunities are equal, and that, probably, this questioning, probably explains why now you tend to have more female judges than you have males because the one who’s interested in a sound family structure wants a regular job. I go in at five, I know I go in at eight or nine, I know by six or something. I’m back home with my family, I can still put my kids to bed before for school the next day and so on and so forth. If I’m inactive, then education in which tomorrow I have to go to Uyo, then from Uyo, I’m asked to go to Asaba, then I come back, I’m in Lagos for a couple of days, then I have to go off to Kano, it’s unsettling.
So generally, I think that is a challenge the women face, but, by and large, I think, if you take that out, the opportunities are fairly equal”.
Oyin Alakija: “I can imagine that completely. I think also for female, especially if you’re married, the support of your husband is very important in making business decisions. And, if you are unmarried, your parents, the way they encourage you, because, some parents will say, you can’t, you just can’t go there. So, I think that’s all important. Thank you so much for your words of wisdom and thank you for sharing it with us today, thank you for sharing your experiences and I hope, teaching young lawyers how to stay in the game and get to the top of the ladder just as you have”.
Dele Belgore: “Well, thank you very much, like I said, it’s a pleasure, doing this, talking to you”.
Oyin Alakija: “Thank you, sir”.
Dele Belgore: “Thank you very much”.
Watch the interview here: https://delebelgore.com/video/
