Is There a Remedy at All? The Lawyer's First Uncomfortable Answer

The client has told you everything, or at least he thinks he has. You have taken the intake. You have the names, the dates, the documents, the chronology. You have asked the questions he didn’t know he needed to answer. Now you close the file for a moment, and he looks at you the way he has been waiting to look at you since he first sat down.

“So, sir — can we file the case?”

This is exactly where a young lawyer is tempted to say yes. The client wants action. The story sounds unfair. Something has clearly gone wrong, somewhere, and you have spent three years being trained to solve problems, not to sit with them unsolved. But there is a question that has to come before drafting, before jurisdiction, before court fee, before limitation, before the plaint, before the first hearing. You have to ask yourself, quietly and honestly: does the law actually give this person a remedy?

And sometimes the answer is no.

That may be the least welcome sentence a lawyer ever has to say. It is also one of the most important, because not every wrong in life is a wrong in law.

Imagine a young man sits across from you. “My friend promised he would attend my wedding,” he says.

“And?”

“He didn’t come.”

You wait.

“He promised. He said he would definitely come. He didn’t.” He looks at you as if the injustice speaks for itself. “What do you want me to do?” you ask. He thinks about it. “Make him pay.” “For what?” “For breaking his promise.”

Now you have to explain something that sounds almost cruel to say out loud. A broken promise is not automatically an enforceable contract. The fact that somebody behaved badly does not automatically create a civil cause of action. The fact that something feels unfair does not automatically mean a court can do anything about it. The fact that somebody has hurt your feelings does not automatically produce a legal remedy. This is one of the first distinctions a practising lawyer has to learn, and it is worth writing down exactly as it is: a wrong in life is not necessarily a wrong in law. Which is precisely why this question belongs here, immediately after intake — before a client’s grievance is allowed to become litigation, someone has to determine whether it actually fits a recognised legal remedy at all.

“But something wrong has happened,” the client will say, and he may be entirely right. He may have been treated unfairly, suffered financially, been lied to, been let down by someone who behaved dishonestly or cruelly. None of that is in question. What is in question is something narrower and colder: law does not promise to correct every unpleasant thing that happens between human beings. It operates through recognised rights, duties, liabilities, causes of action and remedies — which is what makes this question genuinely difficult rather than merely procedural. You are not sitting in your chamber to decide whether the client’s story is sad. You are there to determine whether the legal system can actually do something about it, and those are not the same question. A lawyer who cannot tell them apart will, in time, become very expensive — to the client, and eventually to himself.

Take a harder example, because the easy ones rarely test you. A woman tells you her brother has taken her share of their father’s property. This sounds like a legal problem, and it may well be one — but don’t jump. Ask when the father died. Whether there was a will. Who the legal heirs actually are. What property he owned, and whether it was self-acquired or ancestral. Whether anything has already been partitioned. Whether there is a registered deed. Who is currently in possession. Whether any release deed was executed. Whether any previous case has already been filed. By the time you’ve asked all of that, the sentence “my brother has taken my share” has become a set of genuinely legal questions — and perhaps the law does provide a remedy: a right to seek partition, perhaps, or a declaration, or possession, or an injunction, or something the documents reveal that nobody mentioned on the first day. The point is not that you know the answer immediately. The point is that you now know how to go looking for it.

There is a trap hiding in exactly that search, and it catches almost every young lawyer at least once: starting with the section number instead of the facts. The client says his tenant won’t leave, and your mind goes straight to searching “section for eviction.” He says his property is threatened, and you search “section for injunction.” He says the other side didn’t perform the agreement, and you search “section for specific performance.” That instinct runs backwards. Start with the facts. Identify the right. Identify the invasion of that right. Ask what relief would actually solve the legal problem in front of you. Only then go looking for the statutory provision that gives you that relief. It’s worth keeping on the first page of your notebook in exactly this order, because you will need it again and again: facts create a right, somebody invades the right, the invasion entitles you to a relief, and the relief has a section number — never the reverse.

Test the idea on a genuinely confusing fact pattern. A client tells you he owns a property and his neighbour is trying to sell it. You ask whether the neighbour has any interest in it at all. No. Why does he think it’s being sold, then? He’s put up a board. What document identifies the property? You examine it, and the neighbour’s plot turns out to be a different one entirely — the client has simply misread the boundary. What looked, ten minutes ago, like an urgent legal emergency may not be a dispute with the neighbour at all, on the facts as they were first presented. This is why legal research has to wait for factual clarity. If the facts are wrong, the research built on top of them can be perfectly accurate and completely useless.

Sometimes the remedy genuinely exists, but not the remedy the client actually wants, and that gap is, if anything, more important than the case where no remedy exists at all. “I want him punished,” a client says, furious, and you investigate and find a contractual dispute rather than anything criminal. “But he cheated me,” he insists. You ask what, precisely, the man did — and the facts that come back may describe a civil wrong rather than an offence. The client’s desired remedy is punishment. The remedy the law can actually give him may be damages, or specific performance, or an injunction, or the recovery of money. So you tell him, as gently and as clearly as you can: “your grievance may well be genuine — but we have to work out what the law can actually give you for it.” That sentence is close to the centre of the whole profession. A lawyer is not employed to convert a client’s anger into litigation. He is employed to convert the client’s legal problem into the appropriate legal remedy, and the law simply does not promise everything a wronged person wants.

Think, concretely, about the shape those remedies actually take. The Specific Relief Act, 1963 holds a compact group that keeps recurring in ordinary civil practice — Section 10 for specific performance, Section 31 for cancellation of an instrument, Section 34 for a declaration of legal character or right, Sections 37 and 38 for injunctions, and Section 39 for a mandatory injunction. These are not merely examination material to be memorised and forgotten. Each answers a specific practical question: do you want the court to make the other side actually perform the contract, cancel a document, declare your legal status, restrain the other side from acting, or undo something already done? Knowing this small group well enough to reach for the right one without hesitation is exactly what lets you work backwards from a client’s problem to a court’s power.

“I want my property back,” a client tells you, and the sentence sounds complete but isn’t. What does “back” actually mean here? Was he dispossessed, or is he still in possession but threatened? Is someone occupying the property as a trespasser, or is title itself disputed? Does a document stand in the way — a deed, an agreement — that has to be dealt with before anything else can happen? These aren’t semantic quibbles. They can lead to entirely different reliefs — possession, or declaration with a consequential injunction, or cancellation of an instrument, or simply an injunction on its own — which is exactly why “I want my property back” is never a prayer. It is the opening line of an investigation, not its conclusion.

And sometimes, having investigated properly, you have to say no. A client spends an hour describing a dispute with his neighbour — an insult, some ugly words, real anger on both sides — and wants a case filed, a notice sent, the man punished. You look at what he’s actually described and find no identifiable legal right violated, no actionable cause, no statutory remedy that fits. “I don’t think you should file this case,” you tell him. He’s disappointed. “But he behaved terribly.” “I understand that.” “So you’re saying he did nothing wrong?” “No — I’m saying I don’t see a legal remedy for what you’ve described to me.” That distinction is worth holding onto exactly as stated, because you are not a judge of anyone’s morality. You are advising on law, and sometimes the single most useful thing you can do for a client is stop him from spending money on a case that was never going to achieve anything.

This is where professional courage genuinely begins, and it is harder than it sounds, because a young lawyer’s real fear is usually losing the client rather than losing the case. So the temptation is to hedge — “let’s see,” then “we can send a notice,” then “we can file something,” then “the court will decide” — and a matter that should have ended in one honest conversation quietly becomes a file, and then a case, and then years of a client’s life. A lawyer’s responsibility was never to manufacture litigation. It is to work out whether litigation is legally justified and practically useful, and to say so plainly either way — because discovering that no remedy ever existed only after litigation has already begun is exactly the outcome this question, asked honestly at the very start, exists to prevent.

But be careful of the opposite mistake too. “I’m not sure” is not the same sentence as “there is no remedy.” Sometimes the law is genuinely unsettled. Sometimes two provisions interact in ways that aren’t obvious on a first read. Sometimes the facts are still incomplete, or the law has changed, or a recent judgment has shifted the position, or the remedy exists but belongs before a specialised forum rather than the ordinary civil court, or some other statutory mechanism has to be exhausted first. So don’t reject a client’s case simply because the answer isn’t visible in the first five minutes. Investigate. Research. Identify what the possible remedy actually is. Test whether it genuinely fits the facts in front of you. Only then advise — because you are never expected to know everything in the opening conversation. You are only expected to know which question to investigate next.

There is one more dangerous sentence worth naming before you leave this lecture, because it sounds so reassuring that it’s easy to stop there. “My client has a right.” Good — which right, specifically? Where does it come from? What fact created it? What event violated it, who violated it, and when? What relief follows from that violation, under which provision, before which forum, and within what time? If you cannot answer those questions in sequence, you do not yet have a case. You have a possibility, and a possibility is exactly where legal research is supposed to begin, not where it’s allowed to end.

So when the client finally asks, again, “so, can we file?” — you turn the file back toward yourself. You’ve checked the facts. You’ve identified the possible right. You’ve thought honestly about what the other side is likely to say. You’ve researched the law that actually governs this situation. And now there are only three honest answers available to you. Yes — there is a recognised right and an available remedy, and you can move forward. Not on these facts — something is missing, a document, a necessary fact, a legal element, and more investigation is needed before you know which of the other two answers applies. Or, simply: no, the law does not provide the remedy you’re asking for. That third answer is not a failure on your part. It is very often the single most valuable thing a lawyer can tell a client, precisely because it is the one nobody wants to hear.

This is why the order of everything you’ve learned so far actually matters. First the client, then the story, then the intake, then the facts. Then the question underneath all of it: is there a legal right here at all, has it actually been invaded or disputed, and what relief, if any, can the law provide for it? Only after that does the next question become worth asking, and the next question is entirely practical. Suppose a remedy genuinely exists — the law says the client can seek it. Good. But where? Which court, which forum, what is the suit actually worth, what court fee follows from that value, has limitation already run, can this particular court even hear this particular dispute? Because it is entirely possible to have a perfect right, a perfectly available remedy, and a perfectly drafted case — and still lose before the other side has answered a single one of your facts, simply because you walked through the wrong door.

That is the next lesson, and it is where we go now.

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