The English colonial legacy meant that the division of the English profession into barristers and solicitors was initially imported into the colonial Gold Coast. The barrister is the advocate in Court, and the solicitor is the counsellor and the drafter of documents. It was an importation that was to have little impact in that from the very beginning there was no distinction in practice between what a barrister or solicitor could do here. Both were lawyers, and entitled to provide the full range of services of a lawyer – legal advice drafting of deeds, and the conduct of litigation as an advocate in the courts of law. Such has been the development that in 1960 in the Legal Profession Act (Act 32) statutory authority was given to the definition of the lawyers as “the legal practitioner”, which embraces both barristers and solicitors. Strictly speaking, we do not have barristers or solicitors, only legal practitioners.

There have been twenty-one chief justices since the establishment of the Supreme Court in 1876, of which nine have been Ghanaians – the first Sir Arku Korsah appointed in 1956 on the eve of independence, followed by Mr. Justice Julius Sarkodee Addo. Mr. Justice Edward Akufo-Addo, Mr. Justice Lanquaye Bannerman, Mr Justice Azu Crabbe, Mr Justice Fred Apaloo, Mr Justice E.N.P. Sowah, Mr Justice Philip Archer, and the incumbent, Mr. Justice I.K. Abban. The process of “indigenisation” of the Bench reached its conclusion in 1958 when the last non-Ghanaian judge in the person of Mr. Justice Gavin Scott was appointed in 1958. Since then, the entire  of the judiciary has been provided by Ghanaians.

From the enrolment of Sarbah in 1887 until the establishment of the Law School in 1958, all lawyers were trained abroad, generally, with few exceptions, in England at the Inns Of Court. _The numbers were thus small, but the establishment of the Law School has led to a dramatic expansion in the membership of the profession. Today it is estimated that there are some 2,500 lawyers in practice. The figure cannot be more accurately stated because not all lawyers take the trouble to register with the Ghana Bar Association and although the records of the Judicial Secretary ought to give an accurate figure those records only indicate the number of persons who have been enrolled since 1876 when the Supreme Court Ordinance was passed, without giving any indication as to how many have died so that one does not have an accurate figure of how many lawyers are actually in practice, but the estimate of 2,500 is thought to be largely correct making provisions for a ten percent margin of error.

The bulk of these practitioners are to be found in the main cities of Accra, Kumasi, Cape Coast, Sekondi-Takoradi, Sunyani, Ho, and Tamale. The establishment of more courts in the regions will inevitably lead to a greater dispersion of practitioners so that one day the entire country will be effectively covered by the profession, thus permitting the ordinary person to have ready access to trained legal services.

Originally, the Ghana Bar Association did not exist as a formal institution in the sense in which we know it today. In those far off days there were, of course, very few lawyers at the Bar and what could be called a bar association was simply an informal meeting of gentlemen at the Bar which was more a social gathering than •anything else. The tradition developed whereby the most senior member of the Bar was designated the leader of the Bar.

The Bar Association in its informal existence had no officers and kept no minutes of its meetings. It is thus difficult for any researcher to find out exactly what the activities of the Bar Association were in those days. It was only relatively recently, in fact within the last quarter of the century, that our Bar Association has kept formal minutes of all its meetings and kept all other records maintained by important professional organisations world-wide. The acquisition of permanent offices and working staff for the Bar Association is also a very recent occurrence and the maintenance of permanent offices by the Bar has been going on now for not any more than some twenty years.

The Bar has had many leaders but apart from a few outstanding ones like Frans Dove there is no proper record of the office holders of the Bar before relatively recently in 1957, only some 39 years ago, from which time the Bar Association has regularly had a president, a secretary and treasurer and other members democratically elected in accordance with the constitution of the Bar. The Bar Association drew up its first formal constitution and code of ethics in 1958 and from then on except for a few occasions when due to political reasons an annual conference has not been possible, the Bar Association has held a conference annually take important decisions and to elect its officers who hold office for only one year but are eligible ror re-election. The Dar Association considers tnat in this scnsc it is one of the most democratic institutions in this country and it is not for nothing that its members, from the first Ghanaian barrister, John Mensah Sarbah, onwards, have fought for the establishment and maintenance of democracy in this country.