The one thing that has never ceased to amaze me, particularly when I look in my own offices, is the more work that is lost to the attorneys’ profession, the more people seem to be studying to become attorneys and/or advocates.  Very few current students seem to realise that almost every firm in this country either has at its core or base, or did have, either conveyancing or personal injury claims against the Road Accident Fund.  The reality is Road Accident Fund work as we knew it, came to an end on 1 August 2008, and most firms are simply winding  down the work that they have whilst signing up one or two cases based on the new law and hoping that a challenge on the old law succeeds, which if it does, such as in respect of the common law aspect, will not leave as many financially viable cases as there were in the past, given the lack of insurance and no assets of probably 50% of the drivers on the road. 

Many think that conveyancing will return to its glory days in only a year or two and that the market will rebound.  That is patent nonsense, and the only people who would say that are either hopeful estate agents or people who don’t appreciate that the reason for the worldwide recession, the financial problems and the property market that we find ourselves in at the moment, is simply because banks were lending too much money to people who could not afford repayments on those loans.  The property market will only recover to its previous heights and volumes, in terms of sales, when the banks forget what caused this last drama and start again lending money to people who cannot afford it.  That is not likely to happen in a hurry, certainly not faster than 10 to 15 years in my opinion, and the National Credit Act should hopefully ensure that we don’t have such reckless lending again.   Attorneys of course long ago largely lost to debt collectors until contingency fees were allowed - too late to save many practices – and estates that have always been lucrative have pretty much been taken over by banks and estate companies, nobody would even remember that attorneys were meant to be experts on tax some decades ago and that has been lost to accountants and so on, through various fields of law.  It is not to say that if somebody is studying law now is making a mistake – in fact, in my experience as little as 30% or 40% of people with a law degree actually go into practice law and I don’t think it is always just because they cannot find articles, which is a problem in itself, but perhaps it is related to the fact that a law degree does give you certain business skills and many find themselves more happy and secure in a corporate environment. 

If that has been the case in the past, what I am saying is that it is going to be even more true of the future and there is certainly going to be much less work around, much less demand for attorneys and even fewer clients who can pay for that work.  The legal profession itself and its loss of interest on the accounts of conveyancers and attorneys doing plaintiff Road Accident Fund work and those figures are certainly going to come crashing down in a year or two when the majority of attorneys have finished the bulk of their work.  Already, income from conveyancing transactions is down, not to mention the fact that interest rates are lower, meaning that less interest is earned on trust accounts than before.  All in all, in my opinion, it is a very gloomy picture of more and more attorneys competing for the very few remaining economically viable fields of law.  Would I encourage my daughters to become attorneys?  Not a chance.