Little praise of pleading or Story of a fake lawyer with a dress that is too tight
The affair is funny. Last week, an article in the regional press subsequently relayed by the national press announced that a swindler pretending to be a lawyer who had had the nerve to defend an accused in any fraud case had been betrayed by his pleading and his dress. black a little too small for him! This matter may make you smile. Yet it is revealing. Indeed, in the collective imagination, a lawyer is a black dress and pleadings. A vision that is perhaps reductive but nevertheless symptomatic of an old-fashioned system which perhaps still has some good things, despite its detractors.
As Laurent Béard, deputy prosecutor, points out in the above-mentioned case, “ we saw clearly that we were not in a usual pleading.
There was neither the tone, nor the legal content, nor the requests traditionally made by a lawyer ". The fake lawyer in the too tight dress, although proud of his pleading, was logically indicted for “illegal exercise of the profession of lawyer” and “fraud”, he risks up to one year in prison and 5 euros fine. There is an art to pleading.
A case that is worth remembering in a difficult period for the lawyer and his oratorical art. The lawyer's rhetoric. A fantasy for every law student. However, it seems, “orality” is no longer fashionable. And, in fact, it is clear that the time has come to question the pleading. The cause ? The congestion of the courts without a doubt. Trials without pleading would be an obvious saving of time according to the detractors of oral proceedings (which is undoubtedly true for certain cases). But not only. They also put forward the need for a complete overhaul of the hearing system taken as a whole, a hearing which has undoubtedly moved away from its original purpose to become purely material or procedural, between filing and observations. at the call of cause, play your games, nothing is going well!
On the other hand, pleading also has its defenders. And fortunately we would be tempted to move forward. These place the exercise at the very heart of the trial. And if the assertion could seem like a truism, it nevertheless deserves to be underlined here because it is ultimately the heart of the debate: a cause will never be defended in writing as it will be orally. It can be well written, well argued and legally sound, but rhetoric will be able to convey many other things, because beyond reasoning and the intellectual it has the gift of bringing a matter to life. Because a trial, beyond the law, is above all about men. To plead is not only to put forward arguments and defend them with great force, it is not only to reread one's conclusions, to plead is to bring a trial to life, it is to make the protagonists known, it is to speak of a story. It’s bringing to life the principle of contradiction. Give a meaning. Convince. Rethink the hearing yes, but not to the detriment of the pleadings. The eloquence must continue. May it even regain all its letters of nobility and all its splendor!
The fact remains that a new situation must be taken into account today: the health crisis is undoubtedly pushing for a hyper-digitalization of professions. Including the legal profession. Does this mean that the pleading is living its last days? We bet that the future will prove us otherwise. Also, the digitalization of law cannot lead to the digitalization of hearings. Because a trial without pleading also means removing a little more humanity from a profession that is already highly digitalized. And, in this regard, the digitalization of the legal profession itself argues in favor of pleading, with a simple perspective: putting people back at the heart of the trial.