The American Civil Trial Bar Roundtable, an organization within the American Bar Association concerned with the importance of the civil trial system to the protection and preservation of the American justice system, recently issued a thoughtful, comprehensive and insightful white paper on increasing the professionalism of American lawyers.
Acknowledging the elusive nature of a definition of professionalism, the treatise focuses on its generally accepted major components of competency, ethics, integrity, access to justice, respect for the rule of law, independent judgment and civility. With these core values as the metric, the white paper concluded that, notwithstanding recent efforts by bar associations, courts and law schools to enhance the level of professionalism in the practice of law, “the common experience of the profession suggests that unprofessional conduct of lawyers remains unacceptably high.” Unprofessional lawyer behavior, the paper maintains, imposes unnecessary delays and costs on the litigation process, diminishes public confidence in the legal profession and the civil justice systems, and undermines the rule of law itself. As such, it cannot be tolerated.
