Never stop being a lawyer

Time is hard for a business owner and may be getting harder still as we go deeper into the year if all the news are to be believed. I am still trying to be positive either in the business front or the personal front as I have committed myself to my business and had invested a lot in it. Reading the news and talking to bankers have made me more worried and doubt is starting to crept in whether being where I am is the best place to be. I want to keep on practising as a lawyer, owning my own firm and although even if I have to work hard, I know at the end of the day all the money paid to the firm, I have a stake in it. Nowadays, the clients of my firm cannot be quantified as individuals as most of them are companies which we are a part of their panel of lawyers. I didn't set out in my earlier year as a lawyer to be like this.

I started my business as a lawyer in 1999 when Malaysia just came on the back of a recession where businesses failed and people were feeling the pinch. As a new graduate and who had just finished my chambering which made me qualified to practice as a lawyer, I did not really understand the hardship that was faced by the nation. I was still living with my parents, driving their car which I treated as  my own and I was set to be a legal assistant (a term use to describe a lawyer who work for someone else here in Malaysia) in a small firm in my town just south of Kuala Lumpur. I chose a different path when I didn't accept the job but took the chance of plying my trade and pursuing what I wanted most. To look like that lawyers in LA Law which I saw years ago and to be the best damn lawyer that small town have ever seen performing in the courtroom day in, day out. 

Alas, you can say I sold out. I became the lawyer who only stay in the office, goes through documents everyday and never really meet my client unless it is something that any one of my hired hands cannot contend with. Which is rare. They are now better at lawyering than me and I sometimes rely too much on them. But I do dirtied my hands on occasions to ensure I don't lose my touch. I sometimes question why I am still a lawyer although I sometime had the chance to change my course in life and become something else. I don't think I will ever become something else other than a lawyer. Maybe I will add on to my resume but the part of being a lawyer will always be there. I actually even accept the fact a lawyer never retire and I am hoping to still have a valid practising certificate when I die.

Let just say I am tenacious when it comes to being a stubborn person