MGG Pillai's comments in 'The CLP Mess - why is the government silent?' (Nov 20) had me in stitches.

Take the situation of a legal aspirant (maybe a legal clerk) for years, his boss makes the money, knowing little of the law. Much of the work of preparing and filing papers and documents in various registries is left to the clerk. He is enamored with the mystique of the legal profession.

Then he gets a brainwave, "why don't I get the paper qualification and be paid many times more for essentially the same work that he has been doing?"

One can register with one of the many colleges giving such part-time courses. The issue is fees and not academic excellence. If too high a standard is set, and few pass, others will be discouraged from enrolling. And law schools cannot earn their fees.

Then comes this one hurdle after passing and earning the academic degree. The Legal Profession Qualifying Board (LPQB) is supposed to regulate standards for admission to the Malaysian Bar. So it sets the CLP examinations to customise those trained in UK, Australia and New Zealand to the intricacies of local laws and procedures.

Then there is the Bahasa Malaysia paper. It is not easy to pass, but according to Pillai, payment can ease the way, including purchase of the CLP certificate, if not the examination questions.

Does the conscience of the CLP candidate prick at the prospect of paying for leaked examination questions? Not the slightest, I would think. This CLP examination, does not really test and prepare him to be a good lawyer, he determines.

His professional competence is going to be honed from the quality of his work experience over many years in a place of work that affords such opportunities of exposure. It's ridiculous, that he should be frustrated from being admitted to practise law, by the CLP exams.

So he finds a solution, by paying for examination questions, and better still, the certificate itself. Where there is demand, there is supply - for the right fee!

Dishonest as it may be, our legal aspirant is exhibiting several traits that hold promise for future success as a lawyer:

1) The ability to work around a practical problem in this case bribing out of the CLP impediment;

2) The ability to distinguish the important from the unimportant (for example, the opportunity to launch his career is important, and the CLP examinations is not);

3) Corruption is culture so if our aspirant has qualms about bribing, how is he going to effectively serve his clients who need approvals and exemptions from certain elements in bureaucracy expecting bribes, or else the applications get buried or misplaced?

This CLP fiasco is a reflection of a profession mired in either self-denial or hypocrisy. The CLP exam is an excuse, under an arbitrary criterion, to exclude others from competing in and worsening a saturated profession.

This government, unlike Singapore's, is indifferent to the profession being flooded assuming that if lawyers are preoccupied with make a living, they have less inclination to cause trouble.

So I would think that the CLP hullabaloo is more a mess that luminaries of this "noble" profession should confront and address head-on, even more than the government.

The legal profession has to address these fundamental issues of which the CLP scandal raises, so that the public will not come to think as errant, not only CLP examiners and examinees but also lawyers, prosecutors, attorney generals and even judges drawn from the ranks of this profession.