Ethics of lawyer


  • A solicitor's commitment to behaving ethically is at the heart of what it means to be a solicitor. The Law Society supports solicitors in recognising and handling difficult professional situations and making choices which can be substantiated by reference to the SRA Code of Conduct.
    • Ethics involves making a commitment to acting with integrity and honesty in accordance with widely recognised moral principles.
    • Ethics will guide a professional towards an appropriate way to behave in relation to moral dilemmas that arise in practice.
    • Ethics is based on the principles of serving the interests of consumers of legal services and of acting in the interests of the administration of justice, in which, in the event of a conflict, acting in the interests of the administration of justice prevails.
    SRA Code of Conduct: the principles
    Ethical scenarios
    1. Conflicts of interest
    • Complete the scenario in our Professional Development Centre
    2. Confidentiality
    • Complete the scenario in our Professional Development Centre
    3. Speaking up as a junior lawyer
    • Complete the scenario in our Professional Development Centre
    4. Client pressure
    • Complete the scenario in our Professional Development Centre
    5. Change of plea in a criminal trial
    Making a commitment to acting ethically is intrinsically linked with meeting the standards and requirements set out in the SRA Code of Conduct. These standards stem from the 10 mandatory principles. The principles apply to all solicitors and underpin all aspects of practice. [Read more about the principles]
    For advice on ethical issues, call the SRA professional ethics helpline on 0370 606 2577.
  • The Law Society is creating a suite of interactive ethical scenarios featuring Ethel, our ethical guru, who guides users though the ethical issues associated with dilemmas solicitors might face in practice.
    After completing the scenarios, please tell us what you think by filling in the short feedback survey.
    A solicitor finds herself in a position of potential conflict. Can she represent two clients in the same matter?
    There are lessons to be learned about identifying conflicts at an early stage, ensuring good communications with clients and taking steps to alleviate problems further down the line.
    A solicitor must consider his duties of confidentiality and disclosure in a complicated set of circumstances.
    A junior solicitor finds herself in a difficult situation when she discovers potential misconduct by her training principal and supervisor. What exactly should she do next, bearing in mind that he is responsible for signing off her training contract?
    A solicitor is put under pressure by a large commercial client to change the firm’s usual terms of engagement. The situation becomes more complicated when the solicitor represents the client in a Competition and Markets Authority investigation for price fixing.
    In a criminal trial a solicitor is representing a client on two burglary charges, both of which involve preying on elderly people. The scenario explores the ethical dilemma caused by the client wishing to change his guilty plea. As with all of the scenarios, a range of factors causes the situation to become increasingly complicated.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Career of Lawyers

Image
Common law/civil law Specialization Organization In most common law countries, especially those with fused professions, lawyers have many options over the course of their careers. Besides private practice, they can become a prosecutor, government counsel, corporate in-house counsel, administrative law judge, judge, arbitrator, or law professor.There are also many non-legal jobs for which legal training is good preparation, such as politician, corporate executive, government administrator, investment banker, entrepreneur, or journalist. In developing countries like India, a large majority of law students never actually practice, but simply use their law degree as a foundation for careers in other fields. In most civil law countries, lawyers generally structure their legal education around their chosen specialty; the boundaries between different types of lawyers are carefully defined and hard to cross. After one...
Keep reading

Cultural perception

Hostility towards the legal profession is a widespread phenomenon. The legal profession was abolished in Prussia in 1780 and in France in 1789, though both countries eventually realized that their judicial systems could not function efficiently without lawyers. Complaints about too many lawyers were common in both England and the United States in the 1840s, Germany in the 1910s, and in Australia, Canada, the United States, and Scotland in the 1980s. Public distrust of lawyers reached record heights in the United States after the Watergate scandal. In the aftermath of Watergate, legal self-help books became popular among those who wished to solve their legal problems without having to deal with lawyers.Lawyer jokes (already a perennial favorite) also soared in popularity in English-speaking North America as a result of Watergate. In 1989, American legal self-help publisher Nolo Press published a...
Keep reading

Educations for a lawyer

The educational prerequisites for becoming a lawyer vary greatly from country to country. In some countries, law is taught by a faculty of law, which is a department of a university's general undergraduate college. Law students in those countries pursue a Master or Bachelor of Laws degree. In some countries it is common or even required for students to earn another bachelor's degree at the same time. Nor is the LL.B the sole obstacle; it is often followed by a series of advanced examinations, apprenticeships, and additional coursework at special government institutes. In other countries, particularly the UK and USA, law is primarily taught at law schools.In America, the American Bar Association decides which law schools to approve and thereby which ones are deemed most respectable. In England and Wales, the Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) must be taken to have the right to work and be named as a barrister. In the Un...
Keep reading