VIDEO: Trust and ethics - has the legal sector lost its way?

The video is now up for the Legal Services Board Trust and Ethics Panel on 13 October 2022, chaired by Richard Moorhead, with Zelda Perkins, founder of Can’t Buy My Silence to eradicate misuse of non-disclosure agreements, Robert Barrington who is researching the role of lawyers in corruption worldwide, and Jeremy Barton, General Counsel of the corporate scandal beleaguered KPMG. You can click on the screenshot adjacent to watch the session back.

So much is handled by and happens on the watch of lawyers. We can’t have the conversation about trust in the legal profession, without reflecting on their purpose in modern business and the societal basis on which both lawyers and businesses have a licence to operate.

As I shared on the panel, at the core of this for me is the regulatory principle of lawyer independence and how that has become degraded.  Lawyer independence encapsulates the purpose of lawyers in society: to serve your client to the best of your ability while knowing you are not them and that you also have a higher responsibility to serve the public interest.  

Like the proverbial boiling frog, in all the pressures and desires, the focus can centre in on personal interest and the interests you are being paid to advance, narrowing our peripheral vision away from the responsibilities to wider stakeholders, to society and to what is true. This is how standards slip. 

My sense is this is a way bigger problem than we currently acknowledge. The stories I have heard over the years from in-house lawyers and my own experiences as GC show there is so much happening that never reaches the public domain.  For example the alarming calls and messages I received when we published our group working paper on the Post Office.  Stories from lawyers of criminality, illegality, bullying and powerlessness - stories that will never hit the press.   And many examples in my work of where lawyers don’t even realise they are the boiling frog until they talk it out.   

Independence is simply not at the fore enough. It’s not the basis for the employment contract of an in-house lawyer.  It’s not typically built into board governance and board awareness. It’s not something the legal community keeps alive in day to day discourse and legal conference topics.  And it’s not something legal regulators and representative bodies hold lawyers to hold primary. Recently renewing my practising certificate online, any reminder of my regulatory responsibilities as a lawyer and my commitments to integrity and wider society were loud in their absence, something the Solicitors Regulation Authority have told me they will now address.

Bringing lawyer independence - and in particular in-house lawyer independence - undramatically to the fore across all these dimensions would make a significant difference. With all that is happening on the global stage, there is an opportunity to go back to basics on our standards in business and law and why and how we hold them. This includes governance structures and environments that hold us steady in all weather and regulators that not only actually hold us to account, but provide meaningful support.