THIS article attempts to highlight the lacuna in Pakistan’s regulatory framework, which fails to draw an appropriate distinction between lawyers and clients.

Back in 2016, when I was new to the legal profession, having just completed my bar, I started attending the Peshawar High Court. One day, as I was sitting in the chief justice’s court, a case was called, and a number of lawyers approached the rostrum. A short while later, an elderly male lawyer, quite renowned in this part of the world, entered the court through the main door and proceeded to make his way to the rostrum, where all the lawyers in humble obeisance made way for him so that he could take centre stage. As this senior lawyer settled in, the chief justice asked, “who are you?”

I was quite taken aback by this question, as the lawyer had nearly 50 years of experience, and was well known. Yet the chief justice did not seem to recognise him. What surprised me even more was the response of the senior lawyer, who replied: “I am Begum Shakila.” I could not believe what I was hearing, as the senior lawyer was surely a man, and not a woman. But this response was consumed with great normalcy by the chief justice, who further inquired “and your husband?”. To which, the senior lawyer responded: “My husband died in 2012, I am a widow.”

This entire conversation left me flabbergasted; what was even more astounding was the indifference with which it was treated by everyone in court, including the chief justice.

The code for lawyers in Pakistan needs to be updated.

I came to learn, when I later asked around, that it was deemed perfectly appropriate for a lawyer in Pakistan to put himself in the shoes of his client and make submissions to the court in the first person, employing words such as ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’, ‘we’ or ‘us’, thus blurring the distinction between himself as a professional lawyer and his client the litigant.

The practice in Pakistan of blurring this distinction stands in stark contrast to the practice in England and Wales, and other parts of Europe, where you are enjoined by ethical codes to always maintain the distinction.

Core Duty 4 of the Bar Standards Board Handbook enjoins: “You must maintain your independence.” The rules and guidance given in the BSB Handbook pursuant to CD 4 lay great emphasis on maintaining a distinction between yourself as a professional lawyer and the client you are representing. It is inappropriate to present yourself as the alter ego of your client. Thus, rather than a lawyer submitting before the court that ‘Mr Murad has been in breach of the contract he executed with me’, it is more appropriate for him to say ‘Respondent No 2 has been in breach of the contract he executed with the petitioner’.

The nearly 180-page BSB Handbook addresses various scenarios which may impinge upon a lawyer’s independence, and spells out how to obviate them.

In contrast, only Chapter XII of the Pakistan Legal Practitioners and Bar Council Rules, 1973, deals with the professional conduct and etiquette of lawyers, and it covers only six pages. It does not speak with similar lucidity about the lawyer-client distinction or other ethical dilemmas.

It is not sufficient for an ethical code for lawyers to employ terms such as ‘maintain your independence’, the ‘best interest of each client’, ‘honesty and integrity’, ‘duty to the court’, etc, and expect such terms to, ipso facto, provide adequate guidance to lawyers to navigate ethical dile­mmas, especially when duties conflict and competing interests are involved. The BSB Handbook gra­pp­les with these terms in great detail, atten­ding to various ethical dilemmas, whereas the indigenous code for lawyers in Pakistan does not; this creates space for individual moral evaluation and conclusions when ethical dilemmas arise.

And the problem with morality, as Hans Kelsen notes in The Pure Theory of Law, is that it is a relative concept, and can lead to very different conclusions. The Analects recounts precisely such a story, which is worth narrating here: “The Duke of She observed to Confucius ‘In my part of the country there is a man so honest that when his father appropriated a sheep, he bore witness to it’. ‘The honest in my part of the country’, replied Confucius, ‘are different from that — for a father will screen his son and a son his father — and there is honesty in that’.”

If the lawyer-client distinction and other ethical dilemmas — and one can list hundreds — are to be clarified, the Pakistan Legal Practitioners and Bar Council Rules, 1973, needs to be updated to speak in clearer terms.

The writer is a practising barrister.

Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2025