By Oghenemaro Festus Emiri

Introduction
This topic no doubt will interest many people related in the provision of legal services market [providers and consumers of legal services] and the general public, particularly those interested in negotiating the ambits of our anti-trust or competition law and practice. This paper does not seek to address of their concerns, though some will invariable be raised and answer using an economic analysis the paper adopts.[1] Some are bound to be disturbed that this paper seeks to question whether the privilege of Senior Advocate of Nigeria [SAN] constitutes cartelization or unfair preference.

This is expected because for them the conferment of the SAN rank (is in theory) nothing more than an expression of the legal professions professional judgment or opinion on the quality of different lawyers in the market of legal services. It does not amount to debarring others from the market.

After all, no lawyer is compelled to seek the conferment. The sphere of personal autonomy is not abused by it. This no doubt is the situation. But in practice, lawyers as providers of legal services and potential clients as consumers in the market recognize that the title is critical to what share a lawyer can get from the market.

Lawyers who don’t get “endorsed” as it were by the Legal Practitioners’ Privileges Committee (LPPC) naturally have difficulty attracting enough share of level-ground entry and impede competition in legal markets.[2] Despite this fact, rarely anyone, not even lawyers or federal antitrust officials, would contend that legal ranking is inherently anticompetitive and hence must be treated as per se illegal under the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection [FCCP] Act, 2018.[3] In fact, courts have shown reluctance to hold that professional rules per se amount to cartelization and that ranking creates ant-trust. if anything, the thinking is that ranking serve a pro-competitive function, by providing consumers with information about quality that they need to make informed decisions on complex professional services.

In other words, to the extent that LPC ranking potentially informs the public which lawyer s a good advocate than another, it has the potential of benefitting consumers by protecting prospective clients from (sub)standard advocates and future clients from less qualified practitioners. This kind of argument must sound preposterous. It must be especially if it characterizes the LPPC ranking as a cartel of the legal profession is designed to induce the public to boycott unranked professionals for serous litigation in order to control the legal services market.

Admittedly, there s strong reason to believe that ranking by its very nature is price fixing and per se illegal. The arguments on the divide are certainly plenty, with each side having good enough argument arsenal. For this reason, despite the general benefits attributed to ranking, subjecting it to some level of antitrust scrutiny is appropriate. This is the exact intent of the paper.

Applying cartelization principles to ranking in the legal profession is not an easy task. It raises perplexing legal and social questions concerning professional governance, constitutional rights, and possible state action to regulate supposed “watchdogs” of state abuses and misuse of power, as well as interrogating various professional and other social policy issues at the heart of modern democracy. It is probably due to these complications that the LPPC has faced no known challenge of its ranking practice.

This Article addresses the major antitrust issues concerning LPPC ranking. The first issue it bites considers the overall anticompetitive impact of the LPPC ranking process. The analysis uncontrovertibly shows that ranking is harmful on competition, especially in terms of adverse output and price effect on the legal services market. Tangentially, it examines the general purpose of the ranking program, the legitimacy of the purpose, and the means of effectuating it through a licensing board, the LPC that may not necessarily be properly qualified for the purpose, particularly when its decisional outcome are not open to public scrutiny common to open-access democratic ethos. Next, the paper examines traditional argument for ranking policy, that it benefits consumers who come to have available information regarding the quality of advocacy services available in the market.

It is the thinking that such information enables consumers to make informed market choices without incurring high search costs. The strength of the supposition is considered weak when applied to legal services than when applied to more scientific and technically sophisticated areas, such as medicine and engineering. Additionally, market failure theory especially those related to negative externalities s deployed to counter argument n favour of ranking that it provides quality assurance for legal services.

It next examines whether outside the conclusion that aspects of the LPPC ranking are anticompetitive, if the antitrust laws may not be the best tool to bring about drastic changes with ranking important policy. Considering general court reluctance to interfere n matters of this nature, professional association rules, whether the harmful effects of ranking implications not just markets, but important constitutional provisions requiring a rethink or overhauling of the ranking process and standards to allow the operation of more transparent scrutiny of the current standards laced with secrecy.