Adrian Evans

Inside Lawyers' Ethics

Legal ethics is often described as an oxymoron – lay people find the concept amusing and lawyers can find ethics impossible. But the best lawyers are those who have come to grips with their own values and actively seek to improve their ethics in practice. Inside Lawyers’ Ethics is designed to help law students and new lawyers to understand and modify their own ethical priorities, not just because this knowledge makes it easier to practise law and earn an income, but also because self-aware, ethical legal practice is right, feels better and enhances justice. Packed with case studies of ethical scandals and dilemmas from reallife legal practice in Australia, each chapter delves into the most difficult issues lawyers face. From lawyers’ part in corporate fraud to the ethics of time-based billing, the authors expose the values that underlie current practice and set out the alternatives ethical lawyers can follow. This book is a compact, usable resource for all students, teachers and practitioners in the disciplines of law and ethics.

Almost there : empirical insights into clinical method and ethics courses in climbing the hill towards lawyers' professionalism

Lawyers’ professional (ethical) behaviour is under challenge as a result of major public disclosures in recent years. In an effort to deal with such challenges, a focus on ethical fundamentals is called for. It is not unreasonable to assume that lawyers’ moral reasoning might play some role in the decisions that are made in everyday legal practice, especially those that lead to subsequent criticism. However, until now there has been a dearth of research into ethical responses of Australian lawyers or law students. A longitudinal study exploring the relationships between values and ethical behaviour for early-career legal practitioners has been concluded. This study situated participants within hypothetical contexts that provided for ethical dilemmas and comprised a representative Australian cohort of final year law students, tracking them through their first two years of employment or further study. Of particular interest in the conclusions reached in this study was the effect of gender, clinical experience and prior ethics education on changing responses. Findings suggested that there were significant differences over time in responses to ethical dilemmas, particularly for females and participants who experienced clinical and ethics-focused subjects during their law degree. Like females, participants who had completed a clinical placement and ethics course were more likely to exhibit significant changes in responses across the three years of the study. The direction of change could be said to be largely in the direction of better ethical conduct. This could be a consequence of greater exposure to ethical dilemmas and scenarios during clinical placement experiences and ethics courses. The implications of results are discussed in the contexts of ethics education in a tertiary educational environment, and postadmission to legal practice.

Independent Evaluations of Clinical Legal Education Programs: Appropriate Objectives and Processes in an Australian Setting

While some major Australian law schools remain in what can only be described as clinical oblivion, 20 of our 29 law schools describe themselves as having clinical programs of one variety or another. This number signifies that the majority of Australian law deans now believe that some sort of clinical program is important to the educational and even social objectives of their schools. At its heart, it is argued, clinical legal education is simply the best way to teach normative law and the skills of normative analysis and to instil the sense of professionalism in students which a sceptical client community increasingly considers essential in its lawyers. But nothing is taken for granted in education, and clinical programs must periodically evaluate their performance in the same way as other programs, particularly when the prize could be greater overall engagement from the new federal government in innovative tertiary legal education. Periodic reviews by law schools of all aspects of their legal education mix are a reality, and their cyclical reoccurrence provides ongoing opportunity to improve the integration of conventional and clinical law teaching. Clinical educators need to be prepared for the cyclical review process, not because reviews can help to sustain their program but because such reviews provide opportunities to entrench the sustainability of legal education itself. This article is about the need for clinicians to be effectively prepared for independent, external reviews of law school clinical programs. It identifies what a clinical review should examine and what process is best adopted by such an evaluation in an Australian legal education setting, in order to maximise the prospects for workable and integrated clinical-legal education.

From Scandal to Scrutiny: Ethical Possibilities in Large Law Firms

In the past few years a number of events have undermined the reputation of lawyers involved in large law firm practice. As Enron melted down in 2001, the role of its lawyers came under scrutiny amidst claims that they had sanctified deals that had hidden liabilities from the market.1 In 2002, document destruction advised by several large law firms led an Australian Supreme Court judge to strike out the defence of a tobacco company involved in litigation against a terminally ill smoker.2 The activities of large law firm lawyers who supported the tobacco industry came in for particularly strident criticism by a US judge:

Inside Lawyers’ Ethics: List of tables

Legal ethics is often described as an oxymoron – lay people find the concept amusing and lawyers can find ethics impossible. But the best lawyers are those who have come to grips with their own values and actively seek to improve their ethics in practice. Inside Lawyers’ Ethics is designed to help law students and new lawyers to understand and modify their own ethical priorities, not just because this knowledge makes it easier to practise law and earn an income, but also because self-aware, ethical legal practice is right, feels better and enhances justice. Packed with case studies of ethical scandals and dilemmas from reallife legal practice in Australia, each chapter delves into the most difficult issues lawyers face. From lawyers’ part in corporate fraud to the ethics of time-based billing, the authors expose the values that underlie current practice and set out the alternatives ethical lawyers can follow. This book is a compact, usable resource for all students, teachers and practitioners in the disciplines of law and ethics.

Inside Lawyers’ Ethics: List of illustrations

Legal ethics is often described as an oxymoron – lay people find the concept amusing and lawyers can find ethics impossible. But the best lawyers are those who have come to grips with their own values and actively seek to improve their ethics in practice. Inside Lawyers’ Ethics is designed to help law students and new lawyers to understand and modify their own ethical priorities, not just because this knowledge makes it easier to practise law and earn an income, but also because self-aware, ethical legal practice is right, feels better and enhances justice. Packed with case studies of ethical scandals and dilemmas from reallife legal practice in Australia, each chapter delves into the most difficult issues lawyers face. From lawyers’ part in corporate fraud to the ethics of time-based billing, the authors expose the values that underlie current practice and set out the alternatives ethical lawyers can follow. This book is a compact, usable resource for all students, teachers and practitioners in the disciplines of law and ethics.

Inside Lawyers’ Ethics: List of case studies

Legal ethics is often described as an oxymoron – lay people find the concept amusing and lawyers can find ethics impossible. But the best lawyers are those who have come to grips with their own values and actively seek to improve their ethics in practice. Inside Lawyers’ Ethics is designed to help law students and new lawyers to understand and modify their own ethical priorities, not just because this knowledge makes it easier to practise law and earn an income, but also because self-aware, ethical legal practice is right, feels better and enhances justice. Packed with case studies of ethical scandals and dilemmas from reallife legal practice in Australia, each chapter delves into the most difficult issues lawyers face. From lawyers’ part in corporate fraud to the ethics of time-based billing, the authors expose the values that underlie current practice and set out the alternatives ethical lawyers can follow. This book is a compact, usable resource for all students, teachers and practitioners in the disciplines of law and ethics.

Inside Lawyers’ Ethics: Frontmatter

Legal ethics is often described as an oxymoron – lay people find the concept amusing and lawyers can find ethics impossible. But the best lawyers are those who have come to grips with their own values and actively seek to improve their ethics in practice. Inside Lawyers’ Ethics is designed to help law students and new lawyers to understand and modify their own ethical priorities, not just because this knowledge makes it easier to practise law and earn an income, but also because self-aware, ethical legal practice is right, feels better and enhances justice. Packed with case studies of ethical scandals and dilemmas from reallife legal practice in Australia, each chapter delves into the most difficult issues lawyers face. From lawyers’ part in corporate fraud to the ethics of time-based billing, the authors expose the values that underlie current practice and set out the alternatives ethical lawyers can follow. This book is a compact, usable resource for all students, teachers and practitioners in the disciplines of law and ethics.

Inside Lawyers’ Ethics: Acknowledgments

Legal ethics is often described as an oxymoron – lay people find the concept amusing and lawyers can find ethics impossible. But the best lawyers are those who have come to grips with their own values and actively seek to improve their ethics in practice. Inside Lawyers’ Ethics is designed to help law students and new lawyers to understand and modify their own ethical priorities, not just because this knowledge makes it easier to practise law and earn an income, but also because self-aware, ethical legal practice is right, feels better and enhances justice. Packed with case studies of ethical scandals and dilemmas from reallife legal practice in Australia, each chapter delves into the most difficult issues lawyers face. From lawyers’ part in corporate fraud to the ethics of time-based billing, the authors expose the values that underlie current practice and set out the alternatives ethical lawyers can follow. This book is a compact, usable resource for all students, teachers and practitioners in the disciplines of law and ethics.

Inside Lawyers’ Ethics: Table of statutes

Legal ethics is often described as an oxymoron – lay people find the concept amusing and lawyers can find ethics impossible. But the best lawyers are those who have come to grips with their own values and actively seek to improve their ethics in practice. Inside Lawyers’ Ethics is designed to help law students and new lawyers to understand and modify their own ethical priorities, not just because this knowledge makes it easier to practise law and earn an income, but also because self-aware, ethical legal practice is right, feels better and enhances justice. Packed with case studies of ethical scandals and dilemmas from reallife legal practice in Australia, each chapter delves into the most difficult issues lawyers face. From lawyers’ part in corporate fraud to the ethics of time-based billing, the authors expose the values that underlie current practice and set out the alternatives ethical lawyers can follow. This book is a compact, usable resource for all students, teachers and practitioners in the disciplines of law and ethics.