To what extent, if any, do lawyers have a professional obligation to serve the wider public interest? For example, everybody agrees it is a bad thing that none of the top law firms are prepared to act against their banking clients. So why hasn’t anybody done anything about it? Indeed, it is not even clear where the blame lies. Does it lie with the firms themselves, who are not prepared to risk losing their lucrative banking instructions? Or is it the clients’ fault, for exploiting their privileged positions for selfish means? Or should the Law Society be more robust in its championing of the profession’s traditional values?
Take another example: the criminal waste of court time taken up by the BCCI/Bank of England case. At the Legal Week Litigation Forum last year, the former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, pointed out that advisers had a duty not just to serve the interests of their client, but also that of the courts, which require cases to be conducted sensibly. In an article in Legal Week earlier this year (1 March), Royston Greenwood, Telus chair of strategic management at the University of Alberta’s school of business, argued that the size and international reach of the leading law firms together with increased competition had changed the way business lawyers define their professional obligations away from the notion that they are ‘trustees of a higher set of principles’ and towards a commitment to ‘commercially focused’ expertise. He warned this could lead to an erosion of professional behaviour.
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