Chambering - part I

Upon completion of the LLB Degree course, I was given the opportunity to read in chambers of Messrs Soraya Chuah & Associates in USJ, Subang Jaya, Selangor. As mentioned before, life as a student who read in chambers or chambering is not as easy as it looks.

First, u have a master who u need to serve - it may sounds a bit serious but that is the true fact. A master will eventually share some of his or her experiences as a senior law practitioner and if you try hard enough, you will learn a lot of things while reading in chambers. This is because the law changes every now and then; new laws were created and each day you will find a new fact about law that you don't even know before.

As for me I enjoy the generous supervision of my master Capt. (R) Sunny Matthews as he told me that if you want to learn, hardworking is most important. If you don't know or unsure of certain things, you should ask. Keeping your mouth shut will do you no good. As lawyers we need to speak a lot rite and having a good speaking skill will help in lot whenever you present your client's case in court.

Aha..i forgot to tell you that before you choose a particular law firm to read in chambers, first you must at least know what are the practices of lawyers in that firm. For instance if you are interested in criminal law then find a firm that offer services in that field. Generally, most law firms in our county practices in litigation and conveyancing matters. Therefore, if you opt to learn more about litigation and conveyancing, then you should not have any worries. Firms will advertise reading in chambers vacancies from time to time and please check at your respective faculties as some of this firms prefer to recruit directly from Law Schools.

Let me share with you on things that I've learn from my master. Since my master was an expert in conveyancing, I was given the opportunity to learn almost every possible aspect of it. From registration of land titles, how to make a land search, possible matters that may arise from a land dispute and of course attending special hearings of land cases at the Land Office. I even traveled to Sungai Besar Land Office alone to experience, to feel and to learn the procedures relating to land matters like making a formal search of land titles and attending hearings. It was a beauty for me to discover that force sale of a defaulted debtor's house will eventually take time as there are certain procedures and steps that need to be taken before any order was given by the Assistant Land Administrator to effect the sale process. It was then that I've realized such procedures applied only to houses with titles. For houses without titles the procedures are different. You see the law itself is a very broad subject and even today I kept learning new things about it.

I'll continue some more in my next post.