Press fights to free lawyers caught in Enron avalanche

The fallout from the Enron affair continues to trickle down the gutters, with The Financial Times launching a spirited defence of the lawyers involved with the world's largest bankruptcy.

'Don't blame the lawyers for Enron,' the paper pleaded (21 February), explaining that 'to hear whistleblower Sherron Watkins' testimony last week, you would think that lawyers and accountants are cast together in the same pit of blame...

lawyers colluded with accountants to despoil a perfectly good company'.

However - in a somewhat odd way of sticking up for beleaguered lawyers - the paper explained that 'the lawyer's role is far more circumscribed [than the accountant's] and fundamentally less virtuous', meaning that where accountants and regulators have duties to third parties - such as the investing public and shareholders - lawyers have only to 'reveal the law, not as it should be, but as it is'.In what is probably the first time that a supposed lack of conscience has been held up as a virtue, the article concluded that lawyers 'are not charged with protecting investors, or Enron employees, or retirees, and far less with society as a whole'.The Enron debacle was playing on the papers' minds this week, with The Financial Times asking the day before: 'Would you seek legal advice from Andersen?' This 'mischievous dig at the firm's current Texan troubles' led into a discussion of multi-disciplinary partnerships (MDPs) and last week's decision by the European Court of Justice 'to bring the accountants' multi-disciplinary juggernaut to a shuddering halt' (see [2002] Gazette, 21 February, 1).

Despite admitting that 'the accountancy profession is more efficient and more process driven, more competitive and lower-margin than the magic circle firms', the article concluded that 'accountants do not make lawyers'.

Whereas 'accountants are ill-equipped to keep bosses out of jail', lawyers 'sell something which no one else sells - absolute secrecy'.This may be so, but recent rulings have shown that lawyers are not above the law, specifically anti-discrimination laws.

Two weeks ago, a secretary at City firm Charles Russell won a confidential payout after an e-mail requesting her replacement to be a 'busty blonde' circulated between two solicitors; likewise barrister Gordon Pringle was recently suspended from practice for a year after making racist remarks.

According to barrister Declan O'Dempsey writing in The Times, 'as the gatekeepers of justice, the legal profession must be seen to be at the forefront of the campaign against racism', and 'eradicating overtly racist language is a start, but no more' (19 February).

He admitted that 'discrimination frequently occurs in the profession', and urged the Bar Council 'to ensure that its code of conduct can eradicate the kind of attitudes that lead to institutional racism within an organisation'.In the week when the government announced that the Crown Court would use text messaging and other technologies to communicate with all the parties to a case (see [2002] Gazette, 21 February, 5), they could now also be sent messages saying 'the defendant has not arrived, but the case begins anyway'.The House of Lords last week ruled that 'criminals who try to evade justice by running away can be put on trial in their absence' (The Times, 21 February).

Delivering a test case judgment, the law lords declared that judges were able to proceed with a trial in the absence of a defendant, 'but they should use this power to proceed without a defendant very carefully'.And finally, Marcel Berlins, writing in The Guardian, viewed the video produced by the Lord Chancellor's Department which encourages professionals to apply to become part-time judges, or, to give it its full title, in Mr Berlins' opinion, 'the idiot's guide to recruiting judges' (20 February).

The 'simplistic' and 'patronising' tape seems to be 'aimed at a not very bright teenager', and he concluded that 'if candidates need this video to tell them how to apply, then they're too stupid or gormless to become a judge, however part-time'.Victoria MacCallum