ACCRA and the Post-Bellum Bar

Here it is, the book. I will not say, finally, even if the book was supposed to come out on the 25th anniversary of the Firm. It did not. There was this and that snag. Not least the great writer died. His nephew Tony took over, and he took ill. And while the manuscript lay fallow, the partners went over it, and took their damned time.

Each found it lacking in this aspect or that of the Firm; the manner and context of its creation; and of its early to late development. Boy Laz observed that there was a great deal of Joycean stream of consciousness that needed to be cut out. Each partner insisted on his input, and the others insisted on theirs. And then, and this is the best part, they forgot all about it. So, manuscript and new inputs were allowed to simmer together—typed pages and the handwritten notes on the margins, but above all in the back of the partners' minds.

Years passed, and I mean years, and then I was called in; and even then, more than a year would pass again.

I did not find it complete either. Some parts were missing, a key chapter at least after some of the partners had moved out and moved on. Not enough credit was given to Myrna Feliciano, the conscience and memory of Philippine law. I asked for help from Tess Herbosa, a contemporary of mine in the Firm, who watched our batch, and the ones before ours, all the way up to the partners—with a skeptical and an amused eye, and a sharp tongue to go with it. She is not asked to speak here, because sleeping dogs are best left to lie.

So here is the book, finally. But not because it was delayed in publication, but because it is...finally...fully gestated and ripe for it. Sadly one of the partners had died, and the literary one at that. I never verified it but Manny Abello had the rumored distinction of having a major in literature, with emphasis on Richardson and his bible thick-masterpiece, Clarissa Harlowe. The Firm then had intellectual snobs, with varied interests outside law. I have a particular recollection of one who was fascinated with the American civil war, in whose company you had to be quick to duck when a book flew impatiently out of his hand. To be sure, just as quickly, he commiserated with the target as if it was all beyond his control.

The life of the law, said Holmes, is not logic but experience. If this book was just that—the narrative of one firm’s experience, it would be a scrapbook for the founding partners' exclusive enjoyment; yet another corporate gift no one will open; and the rest of the copies unloaded on working members of the firm to fatten up their Christmas package. But this book is far more than that.

Had it been just that, even the talent of Nick Joaquin would not be equal to the task. It is foremost about the life of the law in the Philippines. Indeed, halfway through this thick, and very elegantly designed and produced volume, it is still that—the life of Philippine law practice; well before 5 whip smart lawyers, relatively new to the practice, took it in a direction that was halfway the usual path and halfway the path rarely if ever traveled.

Now we are in the story proper of the Firm, but just when the narrative might have turned into a scrapbook, Nick Joaquin consults the competition for their 2 cents worth on the Firm; which the partners found / either prickly, amusing or enlightening because they left it all there.

And just when that uncomfortable part is over, history intervenes in the narrative. And in a really big way; so much so that the country is the cover story of Time and Newsweek, and nightly on ABC, NBC and CBS news, regarding an election over which one of the partners was presiding. How did he get there? I wondered about that.

So this is the story of legal practice in the Philippines. A story of one practice in the general practice, and of the six —or was it seven?—practitioners who started it. Not everyone gets into the firm name though; hesitate a bit and suddenly there is no more space on the wall. It is throughout the story of a country, from the fall of one empire and the rise of another and the unwelcome appearance of a third and its fall; and of that country’s three republics; the death of one, the birth of another, and democracy reborn. The Firm undertook for this big story to be told, a story not just about it but Philippine legal practice all told—and the politics, and the times, and the country in which all that unfolds in the distinctive late style of its main author.

Ladies and gentlemen, ACCRA and the Post-Bellum Bar by Nick Joaquin—and everyone else involved. It is his and their book really.