By Lawal Ijaodola and Nnamdi Uzuegbu

Introduction

In this paper, submitted to the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters, we assess three aspects of the Legal Practitioners’ Bill, 2025 (the “Bill”) that, in our view, are neither principled nor defensible: the introduction of a mandatory two-year pupillage before qualification as a legal practitioner; the proposal to raise the minimum eligibility period for the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria from ten to fifteen years; and the restructuring of the disciplinary framework for legal practitioners, particularly the provisions governing the composition and operation of the Legal Practitioners’ Disciplinary Committee. Each of these proposals significantly alters core features of the profession. Yet none is supported by any clear rationale, policy analysis, or meaningful engagement with the realities of legal education, professional regulation, or constitutional requirements in Nigeria or abroad.

Mandatory Period of Pupillage for Two Years (Section 25 of the Bill)

1. The Bill’s proposal for mandatory pupillage before a person may fully qualify as a legal practitioner is difficult to justify. It creates more problems than it solves and does so without engaging with the existing structure of legal education in Nigeria.

2. First, mandatory pupillage effectively increases the length of legal education from seven years to nine. A student already spends five years earning the LLB, one year at the Nigerian Law School and one year in the National Youth Service Corps. The Bill now proposes an additional two years of pupillage before qualification. This is a substantial and unexplained increase in time and cost. There is nowhere in the world where people are required to complete a statutory period of nine post-secondary years before qualifying as lawyers.

3. Second, the proposal duplicates the vocational training already provided by the Nigerian Law School. Legal education in Nigeria is intentionally divided into academic training (universities) and vocational training (the Law School). Pupillage is another form of vocational training, but the Law School already provides this through its teachings of procedure as well as its three-month court attachment and three-month law office attachment. The Bill ignores this framework and creates a parallel system that adds two more years without identifying any mischief the existing structure fails to address.

4. Third, the purported reliance on the United Kingdom model is misplaced. In the UK, not all lawyers undergo pupillage; only those who wish to practise as barristers do so, and pupillage lasts one year. Further, a law degree is not required before one can become a lawyer in the UK. A first degree takes three years, and there is no NYSC. The entire pathway in the UK, including pupillage, is only about five years. In addition, practising pupils in the UK are permitted from the sixth month of pupillage to take instructions directly from clients and to keep the fees they earn. This is an important part of their transition to practice and ensures that pupillage is not only a training period but also a period of supported independence. The Bill proposes nothing like this. It simply imposes two years of pupillage without any mechanism for young lawyers to earn or build a practice during the period. That approach is not in the interest of young lawyers at all.

5. Fourth, a further difficulty is the practical and financial burden the proposal would impose. If pupillage becomes mandatory and law firms are required to pay pupils a minimum pupillage wage, say N100,000 monthly (which seems like the lowest reasonable baseline given the current NYSC allowance and the national minimum wage), many law firms across Nigeria will simply be unable to afford it. The likely effect is that firms will avoid taking on pupils, and many aspiring lawyers will struggle to secure pupillage positions. Such persons would then be unable to qualify as lawyers at all. They will also not be able to work inhouse or do any non-practice related work as lawyers. They will not be able to hold themselves out as lawyers. In some universities in Nigeria, they will not be able to teach law or apply for post-graduate programmes. A qualification system that bars entry not because of lack of merit but because of lack of available placements is indefensible.

6. Pupillage can be valuable, but only if it is introduced in a way that reflects the realities of legal education in Nigeria and does not impose unnecessary barriers. If Nigeria wishes to adopt a pupillage model, the more coherent approach would be structural reform: reducing the LLB to three years, introducing a two-year pupillage system, and requiring a standardised qualification examination set by the Law School. The Bill’s proposal does not attempt any such reform. It merely lengthens the pathway without justification and risks shutting many qualified candidates out of the profession.

Rank of SAN (Part VIII of the Bill)

7. The Bill proposes that a person must have been in practice for fifteen years before being eligible for the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria. This has no principled justification. Nothing in the Bill explains why fifteen years is the point at which distinction in the legal profession is presumed to appear. The Bill uses fifteen years as a benchmark in several other places, but again without any principled explanation. For example, it requires fifteen years’ post-call experience for membership of certain bodies in the profession, yet gives no account of why fifteen years is the appropriate measure of maturity or distinction.

8. First, the Bill seems to assume that distinction as a barrister is a function of the passage of time, and not necessarily of skill, learning and the contribution a person has made to the development of Nigerian law. That is not the case. Many leading lawyers in Nigeria today became Senior Advocates when they had just a little over ten years’ experience as barristers. This includes the present Attorney General of the Federation, Prince Lateef Fagbemi SAN, who became a Senior Advocate after only ten years at the Bar.

9. Second, the proposal is also inconsistent with the Constitution. The Constitution requires ten years post call experience to be appointed a High Court Judge, ten years to serve as an Attorney General, and twelve years to be appointed as a Justice of the Court of Appeal. These are constitutional offices that involve the administration of justice and the interpretation of the Constitution. It is difficult to see why a person is thought to be competent to exercise judicial or executive authority after ten or twelve years, but must wait fifteen years before being considered for what is supposed to be a professional distinction in advocacy.

10. Third, the proposed requirement is also inconsistent with practices in other comparable jurisdictions. In jurisdictions that confer equivalent ranks such as England and Wales, Australia, South Africa and Hong Kong, the emphasis is on demonstrable excellence as barristers, not on the mere passage of time. Minimum years of practice exist, but they are modest and serve only as thresholds for basic experience. In England and Wales, for example, eligibility for King’s Counsel generally arises after about ten years of practice rights, and applications are assessed primarily on the quality of advocacy demonstrated in complex cases. Similar approaches exist in Australia, South Africa and Hong Kong, where the decisive criteria remain ability, integrity and contribution to the profession. None of these jurisdictions relies on an arbitrary fifteen-year requirement, and none treats longevity as a proxy for distinction in the profession.

11. Fourth, the Bill also contradicts itself in principle. Under section 4, Attorneys General who may have been in practice for only ten years are empowered to take part in decisions on the conferment of the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria. This creates an obvious inconsistency. The Bill assumes that a person with ten years’ experience is sufficiently mature, experienced and discerning to judge the professional distinction of others, yet it simultaneously insists that a person cannot themselves be eligible for that distinction until they have practised for fifteen years. If ten years of practice qualifies someone to sit in judgment over candidates for SAN, it is difficult to see why ten years of practice cannot also qualify someone to be considered for the rank. A framework that permits less-experienced lawyers to determine the fate of more-experienced applicants lacks coherence and reinforces the impression that the fifteen-year requirement is arbitrary rather than principled.

12. Fifth, a further point is that the majority of those who have become Senior Advocates of Nigeria have, in practice, attained the rank after about fifteen years at the Bar even under the existing ten-year eligibility rule. This means that the process already filters for maturity and experience, that the present system does not produce premature appointments, and that the rank is conferred only when a candidate has demonstrated distinction at an appropriate level. There is therefore no need to raise the eligibility period from ten to fifteen years. The existing framework already ensures that only those who have developed the requisite depth and capacity are considered, without imposing an arbitrary waiting period.

13. Finally, this is a period in which the younger generation of lawyers is breaking new ground, making history and achieving levels of distinction far earlier than was common in the past. There is no reason to make them wait fifteen years before becoming eligible for the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria. And if there is any such reason, it ought to be openly debated and justified. Nothing in the Bill engages with this reality or explains why a longer waiting period is now required.

The Legal Practitioners’ Disciplinary Committee (Part V of the Bill)

14. Section 17(3) of the Bill provides that the Disciplinary Committee shall consist of “a Chairman” (who is not the CJN or a Justice of the Supreme Court) and “such additional number of members as the Body of Benchers may appoint for the effective conduct of its business”. Section 17(4) then allows the Committee to sit in more than one panel and in divisions across the country, while section 17(5) fixes quorum at three members and adds that no decision or proceeding “shall be rendered invalid on the ground of quorum other than as set out in the Interpretation Act”. Read together with section 17(9), which states that the Committee may act notwithstanding any vacancy, irregularity in appointment or participation by a person “not entitled to do so”, these provisions collectively attempt to insulate the Committee’s decisions from challenge on the basis of change of composition. This is directly at odds with the reasoning in Kalejaiye and Gbenoba, where the Supreme Court of Nigeria emphasised that the constitution of the LPDC panel, the participation of those who heard the matter throughout, and the integrity of quorum are central elements of the constitutional right to a fair hearing and not mere technicalities.

15. Section 17(9)(a) – (c) of the Bill, in particular, goes too far. It provides that no proceedings shall be invalidated by “any irregularity in the appointment of a member”, by the fact that a person who was not entitled to do so took part in the proceedings, or by “any variation in the composition of the membership of the panel in the course of proceedings”. These are precisely the types of defects the Supreme Court of Nigeria has previously treated as fatal in disciplinary proceedings, because they affect the identity of the tribunal that hears the case and decides the practitioner’s professional fate. Attempting to declare such defects irrelevant at the level of ordinary legislation amounts to a statutory override of constitutional minimums, which is not permissible. If challenged, a court is likely to hold that section 17(9) cannot save a proceeding that infringes section 36 of the Constitution.

16. The proper way to respond to the jurisprudence in Kalejaiye v LPDC (2019) 8 NWLR (Pt. 1674) 365, Gbenoba v LPDC (2021) 6 NWLR (Pt. 1773) 499 and similar authorities is not to attempt to legislate away the effect of those decisions, but to codify their safeguards. This could include, for example: (i) a requirement that the members who sign any direction must have sat throughout the substantive hearing of the matter; (ii) a rule that any change in the panel after the commencement of hearing requires a de novo hearing before the newly constituted panel; (iii) clear minimum composition requirements and (iv) an express provision that non-compliance with these structural requirements renders the proceedings a nullity. As presently drafted, section 17 gives the appearance of trying to cure constitutional lapses by general deeming clauses, which is neither constitutionally sound nor consistent with the Supreme Court’s approach to LPDC proceedings.

17. The overall disciplinary architecture in the Bill remains complex and somewhat fragmented: the Body of Benchers creates the LPDC; the LPDC adjudicates; the Supreme Court retains independent disciplinary jurisdiction and an appellate role; and the NBA Committee investigates and enforces. The Bill does not clearly define how these bodies coordinate, how complaints flow from one to another, or how timeliness and proportionality of sanctions are to be ensured. There are no statutory time-limits for conclusion of disciplinary proceedings, no explicit requirement for public reporting of decisions beyond gazette publications.

18. Section 18(1) – (3) sets out a spectrum of sanctions (striking off, suspension, restitution, compensation, apology, warning, costs) and requires the LPDC to report to the Body of Benchers when striking off is ordered. This range is broadly appropriate, but the provision still presumes a formal, quasi-judicial hearing as the main disciplinary mechanism; there is no provision for low-level, administrative or consensual sanctions for minor infractions, which many modern regulators use to avoid over-judicialisation of discipline.

Conclusion

The Bill promises reform but does not engage with the conditions that make reform possible. A legal profession cannot be strengthened by measures that ignore the realities of legal education, the administration of justice, the discipline of its members, and the practical pathways through which lawyers enter and advance within the profession. The Bill does not confront these realities. It lengthens the route to qualification without justification, imposes arbitrary thresholds for seniority, and creates regulatory structures that are neither coherent nor grounded in principle. Instead of modernising the profession, it risks entrenching a system that is opaque, exclusionary and detached from the needs of those who will carry the profession into the future.

If reform is to have any meaning, it must be shaped by a clear understanding of what the profession requires now and in the years ahead. It must draw on the experience of those who have spent time in the profession, but it must also reflect the expectations of those who will spend the most time in it. A profession that does not listen to its future cannot successfully reform itself. Our hope is that the National Assembly will approach this Bill with the seriousness that the subject demands and ensure that whatever ultimately emerges is principled, proportionate and capable of moving the Nigerian legal profession forward in a credible way.

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