Charles Hector conjectured that only about 500 of the country's 10,000 lawyers are doing pro bono (free) work for the disadvantaged sections of community because of the failure of the education system to inculcate public interest values like "social awareness, civic consciousness and a sense of justice and compassion".

He claimed that professionals like lawyers and doctors are more interested in pursuing their respective callings for material success and status rather than community service in his letter Legal reforms, not public service mandate .

To tackle this problem, one should look at the other side of the equation first.

Many from the poorer and the middle-class sections of the community pursue the professions (law and medicine) as a route not necessarily to make lots of money but sufficient to break the cycle of financial mediocrity or even poverty of their family backgrounds so as provide their own families and children a better future.

With 10,000 lawyers, competition is inevitably stiff when paying work from clients that are in the position to give it are monopolised by the few well-connected within the profession that control the levers of patronage.

Although there is much legal business, the fact that there is no equal distribution of it means that many professionals are just making ends meet, and barely surviving. How can they be expected to do charity?

To be sure, there are some young and recently graduated out there who are willing to do pro bono work. They do so out of youthful idealism. It has nothing to do with their training and education system.

Lecturers and trainers do not need inspire them to work for the needy and the poor because professions like medicine and law are inherently imbued with such values that are inculcated in those who study them. Whether they respond is a matter of individual character and passion.

The root problem, therefore, does not lie so much in their educational system as the operative system in the society at large that militates against public interest work. This is where the operative system has to be tackled first.

Young idealistic lawyers and doctors coming from well-to-do background and of independent financial means can afford to do pro bono work out of a sense of compassion, justice and social awareness but they are few in numbers, and their limited professional experience is a limiting factor.

The poor and needy need the help of those established professionals with experience to help them more than the idealistic young ones to get experience out of them. Surely, a poor person faced with a criminal charge that carries the death sentence gets no consolation to be assisted free of charge by a young and raw lawyer who has not sufficient experience to save him?

To grapple with this problem in the system level, the following may be suggested:

The Malaysian Bar should abolish the no discount rule. Forget about free services. A heavily discounted fee, provided that professional rules allow, will play a big part to help many who are needy.

Also a benchmark must be set as to who qualifies as poor and in need of free services or services at a discounted rate. Otherwise all kinds of well-to-do people will try to avail themselves to such services.

The Malaysian Bar/Medical Council should also allow their professionals to advertise in the media and Internet of their services at free or at discounted rates for those eligible.

Without advertisement, those in need have no accessibility to professionals willing to help. If it were argued that advertisement enables professionals to indulge in crass commercialism to secure business, so be it.

How does one expect professionals to help the needy with non-paying work if they cannot otherwise canvass for lucrative paying work to subsidise non-paying work?

As for charity, we cannot expect those who are struggling to do free work. The established professionals who are in a position to do so ought to be made to contribute more for those in need of help.

The respective professional bodies should then, as a condition of renewing their annual professional licences, set a "quota" for free/discounted legal/medical aid for those that make a certain level of net profit per year.

Professional recognition by way of awards may, by way of incentive, be conferred on those who do more than their quota.

To be fair, there should be statutory provisions to limit professional liability for those who do free work for the needy. While this ought not be a carte blanche for shoddy professional work, one cannot, at the same time, realistically expect established professionals to bear the brunt of professional liability for human errors and negligence that will wipe out their entire net-worth built from their professional careers, especially when they derive no or negligible income from these areas of non-paying work to defray the high premiums for professional indemnity insurance (raised after Sept 11).