It is heartening to read of the efforts being made to "restore" (perhaps properly rendered as "imbue") an ethic of professionalism to the practice of law:
The story is symptomatic of a worrisome trend – the erosion of professional standards as billings take precedence over the long-term development of proficient, ethical, well-rounded lawyers. With public criticism of the legal profession on the rise, a call for more exacting professional standards has taken on new urgency.
The first task for proponents of the professionalism movement has been defining what they mean. By consensus, it appears to boil down to civility; mentoring; continuing education; maintaining client confidentiality; avoidance of conflicts; and maintaining independence.
“It has to do with the notion that being a lawyer does not mean simply holding a job,” said Ontario Court of Appeal Judge Stephen Goudge, a moving force in the campaign. “This is about being part of a profession that is given a stature and a certain prestige and, in return, includes a significant service component.”
Evidence is mounting that the movement is more than hot air. The Law Society of British Columbia recently became the first regulator to mandate compulsory continuing education for lawyers. Others intend to follow suit, including the Law Society of Upper Canada, which will make extra training compulsory for lawyers in their first two years of practice.
Institutes have also sprung up, such as the Chief Justice of Ontario's Advisory Committee on Professionalism and the University of Toronto's Centre for the Legal Profession.
... Those who are pushing professionalism must come to grips with a business model of law that places a premium on retaining clients. As Cornwell University law school professor Brad Wendel told a U of T symposium on professionalism last week, sharpening your ethical acuity can be difficult when you are “maniacally billing 2,200 hours a year.”
... Notwithstanding the professionalism movement's focus on lofty motives, there is also a defensive undertone to it all. The profession is undeniably under siege.
... The profession is fighting a potent narrative line alleging that the practice of law has declined from a golden age – when lawyer-statesmen operated with a communal sense of honour – into a grubby little trade whose practitioners scrap for the right to gouge clients.
While the effort is admirable, I can't help but envision it as an exercise in pushing a very large boulder up a very steep incline. Practicing law has always been, in part, a business endeavour, but what is particularly troubling is the privileging of the business component over all other considerations - which, to be clear, is really the only way to account for the mega-firms which lumbered across the terrain over the last thirty years.
As many concerns as that development raises, however, there is a much more erosive factor at work - the same corrosive mentality which prompts a "deep spiralling funk" on the part of Ontario Court of Appeal Judge Stephen Goudge, one which the profession is in danger of completely overlooking. And it is this latter matter which is much more important for the future of the profession - the public standing of lawyers (see this [pdf] 2003 Ipsos-Reid survey for a sense of how low public trust in lawyers and the judiciary is) is impacted hardly at all by the "work-life" balance maintained by lawyers, how civil they are to one another or whether the bizarre intricacies of conflict interest rules are observed in the types of corporate cases which impact a marginal handful of clients. Which isn't to say that the foregoing items aren't worthy of attention - but if you want to address the plunging level of public confidence in the profession, if you want to ensure that self-regulation continues, then effort needs to be expended on what actually tends to enrage individual members of the public (the very people, it unfortunately needs to be repeated, whose best interests the profession is charged with protecting): lack of access to legal representation at affordable prices; the perceived coddling of incompetent, untrustworthy and outright criminal lawyers; and the lack of innovation, transparency and accountability in the governance of the profession.
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