‘Cutting edge’ approach to ethics needed - LSB
Proposals to monitor ethics across an increasingly diverse legal services market are set out by the Legal Services Board (LSB) today.
Its report says that ensuring the integrity of the profession in this way is central to maintaining public confidence in the rule of law.
The report examines ways of better understanding the ethics of legal services providers in a newly liberalised market. It investigates how empirical research can be used to track ethics and outlines a series of tools to monitor whether individuals are complying with their core ethical obligations. It also proposes a work programme to generate data around ethics.
Professor Richard Moorhead, University College London’s Centre for Ethics and Law director, who led the report team, said: ‘There is a growing recognition amongst professional regulators and sophisticated legal service suppliers that properly managing the ethics of their service goes beyond providing codes of conduct and policing complaints.
'We can and should develop cutting edge approaches to professional ethics. This report shows that better tools can be developed to understand and promote the ethicality of practice.’
LSB chief executive Chris Kenny said: ‘Regulators, professional bodies and professionals need to better understand the drivers for ethical behaviour and be able to tack changes in a way that goes beyond what the report rightly characterises as the ‘anecdote and argument’ of past discussions. That’s why we welcome… this very thorough and imaginative report.’
Comments
This is slightly ridiculous
This is slightly ridiculous and is typical of the "mission creep" which all lawyers are now encountering from the "primary" regulator
The core of the Legal Services Act 2007 is all about providing legal services to a "consumer" supplanting the ethical professional duty to act in the best interests of a client.
The regulators keep de-regulating and then express horror at the consequences.
For example "bungs" -sorry I meant referral fees and the multiple conflicts of interest with restricted lenders panels
There was always a fundamental contradiction at the core of the last Act.
It is a tragedy that the Law Society did not fight the Act to avoid the seeds being sown for its long terms destruction.
Now the Financial Services Industry are waking up to the consequences of a deregulated banking industry
I dont think it is too late to save the day for our profession but time is running out and the time to act is now
It is just an empire building
It is just an empire building exercise by functionaries and their attendant parasitic "academic" supporters ("trebles all round, barman!").
It is hardly novel that ethics are at the heart of a profession, but I suppose if the professor can get paid good money for stating the obvious, best of luck to him. However, with such an approach, one imagines he is ill suited to preaching about ethics in the first place.
So the report gives nothing
So the report gives nothing solid as a way forward, just vague assertions of more money spinning research for the future ("should develop cutting edge approaches ")but it does manage to use a number of buzz words and filled time for some people, and that's good too, right?
Rest assured David that
Rest assured David that following expensive "scoping" one of the outcomes of the report will be the discovery of a deficit in the drivers currently constituting the legal ethical matrix
At least in the Matrix we got to see leather clad individuals running up the sides of buildings
Just as the bankers lost
Just as the bankers lost sight of the fact that bundling together dross could not convert it into gold, our regulators seem to lose sight of the fact that lawyers just need to be honest, and to act in the best interests of the clients. Endless jargon filled research distracts attention from the essential simplicity of it all.
Where has 'ethics' come back
Where has 'ethics' come back from?
Has someone just realised that if you turn a profession into a business and control it by rules and regulations (whether outcome focused or not) then ethics are going to take a serious hit? Many of us saw this coming and made all the appropriate noises a long time ago. It is all something to do with horses, stable doors and bolting!
Cultures take a long time to build and little time to destroy. I think we just have to realise that those who consider they know more than us, and didn't value professionalism, have pitched us into a cut throat business world where ethics would be a lovely think to have but are unfortunately going to seem less and less relevant to many coming into the legal market - whatever the regulators might like to think or do.
The ethics issue has come
The ethics issue has come back because notwithstanding many arguments like yours being ignored in the past by virtue of the Law Society's failure to protect its members the regulators cannot square the circle
The profession is caught in a statutory conceptual mess - are we traders or
professionals?
Is the only future for the Law Society is to become more militant, or will power and influence leach away to local law societies, or ultimately will each firm become in the words of a learned law professor an ethical silo, leading to the ultimate demise of the Law Society?
Why?
Why does the Gazette persist in publishing pieces which refer to authorities, reports or other documents without including links to those authorities/reports/documents? Here is the relevant link:
http://www.legalservicesboard.org.uk/what_we_do/Research/Publications/pdf/designing_ethics_indicators_for_legal_services_provision_lsb_report_sep_2012.pdf
So far as I can discern, the report has been written by five academics who are (one assumes) not practising solicitors or barristers. It runs to 148 pages, but anyone who uses meaningless jargon like "cutting edge approaches to professional ethics" is going to struggle to entice me to read any of it.
For the first twenty years of
For the first twenty years of my career a solicitor could be struck off for touting (we now call it advertising), I remember a local solicitor being sanction for handing out a business card in a pub! When things started to change in the 1980s a partner in a well respected rival practice took the trouble to come to see one of my partners to say that because we were taking advantage of changes we could no longer be seen to be 'professional'. We are still thriving - they are not.
The profession I joined is long gone and dead, together with its ethics, culture and practices. The 'profession' we are now working in is a legal business employing along with some very good lawyers a large number of what my father disparagingly referred to as 'legal technicians'. There are now five times the number of solicitors that there were when I started. We work under different rules and regulations, we are not trusted as we were, we are more expert, but not necessarily any wiser, and the ever increasing commercial pressures too often test any ethical considerations to destruction.
It has been fun managing a business through these times, but ethics like everything else around us aren't what they used to be - and I cannot see that they ever will be again. Very sad but true, unfortunately - But that is progress?
So, there is no "base
So, there is no "base standard" below which a professional shouldn't go? Everything is relative and it depends on what the government of the day reckons is fine?
Didn't Germany have a bit of a problem with this type of thinking some decades ago? If its legal, it's ok?
The 1970s - Doing trhe timewarp again
The essential and simple problem is the the SRA still think that we live in the 1970s and that we sit around having long lunches and have the money to implement any number of ridiculous regulatory initiatives. This is because the judiciary have allowed the SRA to behave as they did in the 1970s. No accountability for disciplinary prosecutions. The rest of changed in 1986 with the arrival of the CPS but disgracefully, the SRA is allowed to continue as it did when it was the disciplinary branch of the SRA.
Addendum
I meant the disciplinary branch of the Law Society.
The law is dynamic and
The law is dynamic and changing and should not professionalism evolve with it?
Should there not be a new concept of "accessible professionalism" by which I mean that our professional ethos evolves not dilutes, so that members of the public can benefit from knowing that during important events in their lives we were there to act in their best interests - not the rapacious interests of third parties.
The profession has certainly
The profession has certainly evolved but I am not sure about 'professionalism' itself, if you can in fact pin such a thing down.
Of course there should be 'accessible professionalism' and if we are going to continue to provide a sound, independant, trustworthy service to clients who need our help then high ethical standards have to be at the heart of this. However, and it is a big however, this going to be a hard road for many to tread when confronted with the external pressures and commercialism which are part of our life and will be even more so in the future.
I am not sure that the key ethical standards we should have (honesty, trust, independence, putting the client first etc.) provide much room for evolution. I would be interested to know what this would involve.
Professions are based on ethical behaviour
I'm surprised by the tenor of some of these remarks. One of the basic tenets of a profession is adherence to ethical behaviour as often represented by a code of ethics.
One failing of the legal profession in the UK is the lack of ethical education in law school which ought to be corrected and it looks as if LETR will recommend that.
Given, then, the centrality of ethics to a profession, I would have thought the legal profession would have welcomed Professor Moorhead's report as a way of promoting ethics throughout the legal services market and beyond just the profession. The idea here is to have all those engaged in legal services behaving ethically.
That's a good thing, surely.
I thought being ethical was
I thought being ethical was being part of a profession not a trade?
The SRA motto at the top of its letterheading is - "Freedom in Practice - Better outcomes for Consumers"
Chance would be a fine thing since the freedom to practice is being crushed out of the profession!
The negative response to the SRA plans to levy fines is the inevitable weary response, or should I say "outcome", of a demoralised profession, sick to death of the unforseen "outcomes" of the capitulation of the Law Society to the policy maker and drivers behind the Legal Services Act 2007
Looks like a report stating
Looks like a report stating the obvious but in management-speak and jargon. So no, not welcomed by anyone with any commonsense whatsoever. Effectively it is just a sales promotion for guess what? Yes, more training-provided by yes! More academics. As the old phrase goes "those who can, do. Those who can't, teach" or nowadays, regulate.
Wish I could get paid for stuff like that though!
Ethics
The SRA might benefit from reading the book I was given when I was admitted in 1973, 'The professional Conduct and Etiquette of Solicitors' by Sir Thomas Lund. It remains the best practical treatise on ethics for any professional but, of course it is far too old fashioned for our modern 'get rich quick' world.
For god's sake send a copy to
For god's sake send a copy to these Flood and Moorhead people. They might learn something!
Another good read is the
Another good read is the Technique of Persuasion by Sir David Napley
He wrote that lawyers earned fees to be professionals not to give a slice to some shady creature of the 2007 Act
Peter Two minds but a single
Peter
Two minds but a single thought. I too got Sir Tom's book a couple of years before you, and I was thinking about it the other day having recently found it at home. Hardbound, about an inch thick and saying all that was necessary.
I have to agree - far too old fashioned for nowadays. It couldn't be OK, it's far too short and trusting!