One does not need to spend a lot of time in the courts of Pakistan to notice a trend: lawyers and advocates in courts while arguing their cases refer to their clients in terms of ‘I’. Put simply, when an advocate or a lawyer is arguing their case they become personally vested in the matter and that becomes evident from the fact that instead of referring to their client in the case, they refer to themselves as the client e.g. I have suffered this loss, I entered into this contract, etc.
There is an arguable case against referring to clients in the first person. The primary argument is the fact that once lawyers blur this line between case and client they are no longer acting as impartial advocates for their client’s case, but are instead acting in a biased personal capacity. This is not to say that lawyers should not defend the case of their clients fiercely, they most certainly should; however, to argue a case in the first person is actually counter-intuitive for a lawyer because it hampers their independent legal reasoning. The end result is that instead of lawyers arguing cases through sound legal doctrines and notions they end up using emotions to plead their client’s case, which in turn goes against established legal machinery.
Emotions, facts, and legal principles should be kept separate and must not be mixed. A lawyer who becomes personally invested in their client’s case will take all the remarks by the opposing advocate in that same personal capacity, and thus will not be able to separate emotions from professionalism. Once emotions and professionalism become entangled it gets harder to see the bigger picture as sound judgment is clouded.
This proliferate use of ‘I’ by lawyers to refer to their clients may be one of the, though not the only or main, reasons why violence is resorted to in the courts of Pakistan. Lawyers, by using the word ‘I’, end up reinforcing the notion of being personally vested in cases, and as a result, consciously or subconsciously, start arguing cases on an emotional rather than legal and professional level.
Thus, there needs to be a shift in how lawyers conduct themselves in court and how they represent their clients and the first step towards that shift would be to modify how lawyers represent and refer to their clients in court so that, at least subconsciously, a distinction can be drawn between emotions and logic.