“Agent for Plaintiff”: A Fatal Misnomer; Why Ghanaian Lawyers Are Unwittingly Forfeiting Their Protections Through the Misdescription of Counsel in Ghanaian Civil Procedure: an Analysis of the Doctrine of Solicitor-Solicitor Agency vs. Lawyer-Client Reality

The central thesis of this paper is simple but consequential: Order 2 rule 5(1)(b) does not, and never has, referred to a lawyer acting as their client’s agent. The phrase ‘if the lawyer is the agent of another’ means precisely what it says: agency as between lawyers. The routine endorsement of ‘Agent for Plaintiff’ therefore rests on a misconception, one that conflates the lawyer-client relationship (which, as we shall demonstrate, is not one of agency in the procedural sense) with the historically rooted practice of solicitor-solicitor agency.