“…Capacity is
the ability to perform appropriate tasks and fulfil roles efficiently and
sustainably… Capacity building is the combination of efforts, initiatives and
performance to enhance and utilize skills and capabilities of people aim at
sustaining development…”
Mahbubur Rahman Morshed {Essays on
capacity building}
The business dictionary further helped in
defining Capacity building to mean planned
development of (or increase in) knowledge, out put rate, management , skills
and other capabilities of an organization through acquisition, incentives,
technology, and or training all with the aim to sustain development.
In the legal Profession, simply put “Capacity
building is developing the lawyering skills of a legal practitioner with tools
such as training and incentives, the overall result being positive contribution
to the growth of the legal profession”.
The educational framework for building
the capacity of a young lawyer should not be limited to the knowledge gotten
from the Nigerian Law School instead there should be Continuing legal education
through seminars, summit, conferences and the likes to better the skills of a
lawyer. In some Law firms in Nigeria,
the capacity building of junior lawyers is restricted to the experience they
get on the job, the fear being “why train someone that would eventually leave
the firm?” when in truth, any positive improvement to the practise of a legal
practitioner is a positive improvement to the legal profession.
A senior lawyer once said a man leaves a
place to seek greener pastures but tend to stay longer in an environment where
he is well treated, meaning, the fear of losing the lawyer a Law firm trains
can be curtailed by how well the Law firm treats the lawyer employee, the end
result being the growth of the Law firm.
The upside to capacity building for young
lawyers is ‘it need not be expensive to accomplish’, the Nigerian Bar
Association has different mediums that help in one way or another to improve
the skill of a lawyer, from the Annual General Conference, the Young Lawyers
annual summit to the section on Business law and the likes which confer CLE
credits unit on a legal professional.
Many are of the opinion that junior
lawyers are not willing to learn that is why certain law firms don’t engage in
capacity building”. Respectfully but we on young wig beg to disagree. A young lawyer in
active practise, who loves the job or does it as a means of livelihood would
not refuse an opportunity to increase his skills if given one. The only young
lawyer if any who would turn down such opportunity, are those who are in the
profession just to while away time pending when something ‘juicy’ comes up.
Due to the economic challenges of a young
lawyer, achieving individual capacity building comes second to basic needs in
the scale of preference and so places a heavy financial burden on the young wig
and not that the knowledge would not like to be gotten. In institutionalized
Law firms there is emphasis on building the lawyering skills of juniors by
encouraging training methods other than experience on the Job.
It is the reality of life and creation of
God that all fingers are not equal and so, it would be unfair for we to say the same should apply to all Law firms because whether we like it or
not, we have small law firms struggling to find their feet in the profession who
have young lawyers under their employment.
Having said that, law firms can encourage
capacity building in their own little way by paying for a young lawyers
practicing fee, conference fees and other similar dues which would ordinarily
be an impediment to their capacity building.
If law firms invest in the capacity
building of junior lawyers, it stands to benefits greatly from the knowledge
acquired by the lawyer, and if after training and adequate welfare of the young
lawyer, he decides to go, consider it a contribution to the growth of the Legal
industry. ‘No knowledge is wasted’
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