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Almost 2 in 5 Australians think lawyers are unethical
New findings from the Governance Institute of Australia offer an insight into the extent to which legal professionals are perceived by the general public to be either ethical or unethical.
Jerome Doraisamy
The Ethics Index 2019, released today, quantifies the perceptions of adult Australians of the overall importance of ethics and what the actual level of ethical behaviour is within Australian society, examining the various sectors, organisations, occupations, issues and influences across the nation.
The net score for lawyers, therefore, was -2, with just over one-third of Australians seeing lawyers as ethical and almost 40 per cent seeing them as unethical.
Such a ranking saw lawyers fall into the bottom 10 of all occupations across Australia for perceived ethics, with only local, state and federal politicians, real estate agents, directors of foreign companies, aged care directors, mortgage brokers, senior executives and fund managers receiving a lower net score.
The findings offer an interesting contrast to the 2018 results, in which lawyers were perceived to be only slightly more ethical than bankers in the post-Hayne royal commission world.
Moreover, the findings for lawyers were comparable to last year – albeit with a slightly improved net score – when just 33 per cent saw legal professionals as ethical (25 per cent said “somewhat ethical”, 8 per cent said “very ethical”) and 42 per cent saw lawyers as being unethical (27 per cent said “somewhat unethical” and 15 per cent said “very unethical”), for a net score of -9.
The reasons for the ethical and unethical perceptions of Australian legal professionals, as well as a range of other corporate, governance and professional matters pertaining to ethics, will be fleshed out in a special episode of The Lawyers Weekly Show next week.
Jerome Doraisamy
Jerome Doraisamy is the editor of Lawyers Weekly. A former lawyer, he has worked at Momentum Media as a journalist on Lawyers Weekly since February 2018, and has served as editor since March 2022. He is also the host of all five shows under The Lawyers Weekly Podcast Network, and has overseen the brand's audio medium growth from 4,000 downloads per month to over 60,000 downloads per month, making The Lawyers Weekly Show the most popular industry-specific podcast in Australia. Jerome is also the author of The Wellness Doctrines book series, an admitted solicitor in NSW, and a board director of Minds Count.
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