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Ethical dilemmas facing lawyers this year
As lawyers navigate an era marked by heightened social expectations and complex moral landscapes, an ethics expert delves into the pressing dilemmas practitioners must face moving forward.
Grace Robbie
Speaking on a recent episode of The Lawyers Weekly Show, Matt Finnis, a former lawyer who is currently the CEO for the Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership, sheds light on the mounting ethical dilemmas confronting legal professionals in today’s high-pressure environment.
Finnis observes a growing public expectation that organisations – including law firms – elevate their accountability standards and deliver services rooted in robust moral principles.
“It does feel, for a number of reasons right now, that there is a heightened awareness of the need for organisations to perhaps raise their game a little bit when it comes to the trust that they’re required to deliver on,” he said.
He said that this heightened expectation is evident across various industries, where lapses in trust and accountability have sparked significant public attention.
“We’re seeing that in a whole range of sectors, whether that’s been through failures in defence, politics, or in the corporate sector, there seems to be a lot of examples where people haven’t quite got it right,” he said.
As a result of these failures, Finnis outlined how it has heightened the ethical dilemmas faced by legal professionals, positioning lawyers in a pivotal position to go beyond providing legal guidance.
“The demands on lawyers to be able to look beyond perhaps just the straight black and white letter of the law to how they can help their clients solve some pretty wicked challenges is now really important,” he said.
Finnis said that ethical dilemmas are increasingly influenced by public demand for legal practitioners to provide advice that adheres to ethical standards, rather than merely focusing on legal techniques.
“But what we’re also seeing is that there’s a higher standard which the public is holding … the onus on legal practitioners to be able to provide advice to their clients in relation to the interpretation of the law, but not stop there to be prepared to also have a conversation about what the ethical responsibilities that go hand in hand,” he said.
However, he said that legal professionals are typically well-versed in the ethical standards expected of them in their daily practices, as these principles are taught and instilled during their university education.
“They’re generally aware we all have an ethics requirement when getting a legal degree; there’s a part of your compulsory professional development every year you’ve got to tick off the ethics related training,” he said.
Despite the growing demand for lawyers to uphold higher ethical standards, Finnis said that these moral principles can sometimes fade into the background due to competing priorities in daily legal practice.
“What lawyers suffer from is that the ethical dimension of a particular problem can fade. That is because there are higher pressures that come to the fore, and they might be just so busy, or I’ve got to get so many billable units out today or, how it is that we can turn this client into the next client,” he said.
