Corona's pogi points

Chief Justice Renato Corona said in a recent speech that “lawyering is not for profit” and that lawyers should not make a profit off their clients. I think Corona just parted with the mother of all motherhood statements.

Let us set aside the lawyering part of the statement because I think what Corona said can apply across the professions. Everybody takes up a profession, or a calling, with a mind to make a better life for himself and his family.

Everything that a person does is always geared toward self-improvement. We have certain loves that, if it can be helped, we pursue with great passion. But no greater satisfaction is there than that which matches what we love and the enjoyment of success we derive from it.

Thus, if a person loves the law and strives to become a lawyer, no satisfaction can be greater than becoming one and then deriving great success in the practice of this one chosen profession.

Now we may define great success as the number of clients in one’s portfolio or the number of cases successfully litigated. But no definition of great success is ever complete if one does not factor in the meaning of all these in monetary terms.

The same can be said for the other professions. Success just cannot be defined as complete without the money component, unless one prefers to be a hypocrite and wishes to engage anyone in a limp argument to the contrary.

As a practicing lawyer before he joined the judiciary, one is hard pressed to imagine Corona not striving hard to enjoy both his profession and the benefits he can derive from it, benefits that surely must have something to do in large part with money, lots of it.

The same goes with other lawyers, who now must be squirming in the wake of Corona’s reckless statement, which, I would not be surprised, might be seen by his colleagues in the profession as some form of betrayal.

Why would Corona take potshots at his fellow lawyers, especially since the subject of his potshots is clearly something that can lead back to his own doorstep? The way I look at it, he is trying to earn “pogi points” at the expense of his own brothers.

But the worse effect of Corona’s reckless statement is the unwarranted stain it has cast on the lawyering profession. For what heretofore was a matter-of-fact state of affairs running through the entire gamut of all professions, Corona now tries to depict as askew and bad.

Maybe the problem lies in the choice of words. By using the word profit, Corona appears to ascribe something evil to an ordinary aspect in the exercise of all professions. You provide a service, you charge a fee. The better your service, the higher you charge.

That is simply the way of all things, whether you are a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, and architect, or whatever. It is not the fault of principals that they get better pay than ordinary teachers. It is not profit-taking but qualification-driven.

Even among the clergy there is no uniformity in the level of “donations” that might be ascribed to a certain kind of service. A lowly priest celebrating Mass cannot command something higher than a bishop performing the same rite.

Everybody understands this state of affairs and nobody has taken issue regarding the matter, that is until Corona came along. Now, thanks to Corona, there is a sour taste in the mouth over something that used to be associated with the sweetness of successful endeavors.