To simply begin with the answer, it’s just like this: “Depends on how you look at it”, as the children would put it, in Lemony Snickett’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events.

The facts are that legal services are unavoidable when human relations break down: failure in business relationships lead to civil litigation, criminal litigation arise from breaking of laws governing state-individual relationship, divorce proceedings came about when a marriage has “broken down irretrievably”.

The value of having a lawyer represent you in the above matters are:

1.The lawyer provides an independent view of the situation. Up till now, Singapore’s legal system disallows litigation lawyers to charge on the basis of “no cure, no pay”, ie payment is made only when the lawyer wins the case for the client. The reason for this is to ensure that the lawyer’s assessment is not clouded by the thought of how much he stands to gain if he wins for the client – which can lead to winning “by hook or by crook”, which is neither independent nor completely honest.

2.The lawyer has better access to precedents, which is a fancy word for situations which are, in principle, similar to yours. How do you know if the situation is “similar in principle”? For instance, are the cases where dissenting owners seek to prevent an en bloc sale from taking place “similar in principle”? The answer is, naturally, depending on how a judge looks at it. However, this is exactly why you need an independent view of the situation; if you are too pre-occupied with thoughts of winning or how you cannot afford to lose, you may not fully appreciate why arguments raised in a case concerning the fairness of the mechanism of fixing the price (as in the Bedok Reservoir estate) do not apply to the arguments regarding the required number of votes to carry out the en bloc sale (as in Gillman Heights). (To be perfectly understood, both cases are about en bloc sales).

3.The (competent) lawyer is more comfortable with the language and ideas used to describe to the courts regarding what would be fair and just in the case than most people without legal training representing themselves would. This is also built on the previous plus points mentioned above. An independent view and familiarity with similar cases enable a lawyer to understand why a judge may have concerns about making a decision in your favour better than you can.

Now, the commercial realities making lawyers a necessary evil in these hard times are as follows:

1.You will need legal services to ensure that people who have to pay money to you or carry out some legal obligation in order for you to collect money payments do deliver on their promises. If they do not, you need the lawyers to enforce the obligations.

2.In bad times as well as in good, there are people who prey on the weak, ignorant or vulnerable in society. Sometimes, financial pressure is unfairly applied to force the weaker parties to give up something at a much lower value.

Hence, regardless of how one views the worthiness of lawyers, they perform a necessary function in society. Naturally, theart of choosing the right lawyer for your job is the subject of perhaps another article.