Ethical compass: Firms need to be clear on their approach
Having a professional identity as a young lawyer that does not align with the values of your law firm could turn “wellbeing issues into serious health problems”, a leading legal academic has warned.
Stressing the importance of law firms setting out clearly their approach to the public interest, Professor Stephen Mayson said alignment of moral values between lawyers and firms was a “a key psychological issue for how comfortable or not you are in a firm”.
The problem of alignment, or lack of it, was the reason why it was “so important” for firms to be transparent about their position on the public interest, he went on.
“If you are a junior lawyer with a sense of professional identity that doesn’t sit easily with what is happening in a firm, let alone the profession, you need to be able to understand why that lack of alignment exists.”
It could be because the lawyer did not understand the firm’s position, or because the firm did not “understand or want to understand” the lawyer’s position or wanted to take a “deliberately different position”, probably for “economic or market reasons”, that made the lawyer “feel uncomfortable”.
Without explanation and articulation of their approach to the public interest by law firms, they would never “come close” to that alignment.
“This is where a lot of wellbeing issues become serious health problems.”
Speaking on a webinar hosted by the UCL Centre for Ethics and Law in the wake of the publication of his recent report that said some lawyers have forgotten that the public interest trumps the client interest, the professor described the public interest as a “balancing act”.
Responding to a question on how lawyers should be held to account for working with fossil fuel companies in a way that “clearly goes against the public interest”, he said the “real problem” was when lawyers did things that were “not illegal, but might be reprehensible in the eyes of the wider public”, such as those involving the sustainability of the planet.
However, lawyers should be “very careful” not to impose their moral views on the activities of others or “we would not be living in a democracy or a free society”.
He went on: “The public interest is a balancing act. There are some red lines that lawyers shouldn’t cross, but there’s an awfully large grey area where we’ve got these moral compass issues engaged and there is no definitive answer.
“We must reach our own view or what is acceptable or what isn’t and be comfortable with that.
“The problem for junior lawyers in firms, of course, is that the senior leadership might decide to do something that they are not comfortable with.
“The question then is not whether the firm is doing something wrong, but more likely to be: ‘Are you in the right place?’”
Professor Mayson said there were different ways firms could publicise their ethical stances, whether it was by ethics committees, town hall meetings, discussions with colleagues or including ethics statements in annual reports or websites.
He added: “Regulators must be much quicker and tougher in dealing with those practitioners whose actions are manifestly not in the public interest.
“If practitioners don’t uphold the principles of a public profession, they will lose the privilege of being a profession altogether.
“That alone should be sufficient incentive to lift their heads away from a myopic obsession with clients and their own interest.”
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