Introduction

Legal fees and access to justice

Clients are more likely to complain about their lawyers’ fees and costs than any other issue, and even the most conscientious lawyers have trouble explaining fees to clients and controlling their growth. Successful lawyers are effective in managing the communication process so that costs are paid on time, but that communication has many elements and some common pitfalls. Typical complaints include that the lawyer has failed to make proper disclosure of likely costs at the commencement of the matter, failed to provide a written bill, failed to provide an itemised bill when requested by the client, failed to provide an updated estimate, or has charged for the preparation of an itemised bill (even though clients have a right to request one). Deliberate ‘gross’ over-charging also features prominently among client complaints, as does the withdrawal of costs from a client's trust account without their permission, or the deduction of fees in the absence of a proper bill. In all these matters, small individual clients are especially vulnerable. Corporate clients are in a better position to complain effectively about costs because of their greater capacity to deny ongoing work to a lawyer who is seen to be price-gouging. Not surprisingly, clients complain about lawyers who have the temerity to charge costs for litigated matters that amount to more than the amount actually recovered in the litigation. Also featuring prominently among client complaints about lawyers are complaints about excessive hourly billing rates and exploitation of ‘no-win, no-fee’ agreements. There is considerable potential for clients to think that ‘no-win, no-fee’ means exactly that, whereas it is clear that a client's disbursements (out of pocket expenses) and, as we outline below in the section ‘Fees and costs in litigation’, the reasonable legal costs of the other party will generally be paid by a losing client. Clients routinely complain that they have been promised that they will incur no fees unless they win, but find themselves losing and either having to pay the costs of the other side or disagreeing with their lawyer about whether there has been a ‘win’.

One Queensland lawyer was suspended for 12 months for gross over-charging for billing a ‘no-win, no-fee’ client $300 per hour plus a premium of 25% for all work done by any employee of the firm, from partner to paralegal to secretary.

Introduction

As we saw in the previous chapter, the different roles of criminal defence and prosecution lawyers are clearly delineated by the very nature of a criminal trial as a public forum for determining guilt and innocence and upholding the Rule of Law. In civil litigation, however, the nature of the process and the roles and responsibilities of the lawyers are more ambiguous. Lawyers play a number of roles in civil matters which can range from aggressive advocacy in fully litigated civil trials to deal-maker and representative in negotiating the legal structure of multi-party collaborative commercial projects. Lawyers may act on behalf of clients in formal mediation or informal negotiations to settle civil matters. They may also provide advice, guidance and practical help in pro-actively managing and structuring commercial, domestic or governmental transactions and affairs to avoid disputes.

There is a public interest in maintaining the fairness and justice of the court system and the legal decisions emanating from that system. Lawyers therefore have an overriding duty to the administration of justice. In recent times it is also increasingly recognised that there is a public interest in the encouragement of efficient and efficacious dispute resolution without recourse to court where possible. Therefore, even in private negotiations and alternative dispute resolution, lawyers have a duty to the administration of justice, grounded in responsible lawyering.

Lawyers are also, however, representatives of their clients who have a private interest in having disputes concluded in certain ways. When a person needs to use a lawyer, they are often in the midst of conflict and not always at their most altruistic or rational. The work that clients ask their lawyers to do may be aimed at cutting across the interests and positions of other people. People need lawyers precisely because of the conflicts we face as we live together in society. Surveys show that people tend to be critical of lawyers in general but very favourable towards their own lawyer: they condemn lawyers for doing for others what they praise them for doing for themselves – being adversarial advocates.

Introduction

The profession has traditionally seen it as a cornerstone of adversarial advocacy that lawyers serve each client's interest loyally, confidentially and carefully. As we saw in Chapter 4, the touchstone of lawyers’ professional obligations of devoted service to their clients is the trilogy of duties – loyalty, confidentiality and care; and the most strict and onerous rules in the law of lawyering relate to these duties. This chapter is concerned with the first of those duties – loyalty.

The duty of loyalty requires lawyers to avoid situations involving a conflict of interest between a lawyer's personal interest and their duty to a client; or, a conflict of duties owed to two or more clients. It also requires lawyers to refrain from using their relationship with the client as a means of making any personal gain; and they must fully disclose to their client any conflicts of interest or personal gains that do arise. These obligations apply not just to the individual lawyer but to the whole firm: if one lawyer cannot act for a potential client because of a conflict of interest, then usually the whole firm cannot act. These are ‘fiduciary’ obligations set out and enforceable in the law of equity and also reinforced in professional conduct rules and disciplinary decisions. In addition to being sued by their clients for breach of these obligations at general law, lawyers can also be disciplined for misconduct.

The duty of loyalty is a virtue ethics concept and can be based in either or both adversarial advocacy and responsible lawyering. Adversarial advocacy assumes that clients need to be able to trust their lawyers to provide advice and represent them in the legal system completely uninfluenced by any concern other than the client's interests. A narrow adversarial advocacy conception of the duty of loyalty would see the client's interest as the touchstone of the duty. This means that as long as the client's interests are not actually harmed, then it might be possible to ‘cure’ a potential conflict through measures such as client consent or information barriers (discussed further below). On an adversarial advocacy approach, the duty of loyalty also might not survive the ending of the lawyer-client relationship to the extent that the lawyer is no longer obligated to further the client's interests.

Introduction

While the work of lawyers can ensure ‘law is still the most powerful instrument for creating and maintaining a world that is free, rational and just’, it can also have a dark side. Global tobacco companies, with the help of both their in-house and external lawyers, continue their fight against tobacco control measures such as bans on advertising and plain packaging. Indeed, a recent decision by an arbitral tribunal at the Permanent Court of Arbitration found Philip Morris Asia's challenge to Australia's plain packaging laws to be an ‘abuse of rights’, essentially because it amounted to impermissible forum shopping. Other revelations, such as the Panama Papers leak, show how lawyers and law firms sometimes help wealthy individuals evade tax and engage in other illegal conduct through shell companies, strategic use of different regulatory regimes in different countries and the use of confidentiality and privilege. It has been suggested that many corporate lawyers (by which we mean both in-house and external lawyers advising corporations) are ‘ethically apathetic: neither good nor bad, but rather indifferent and unenthusiastic when it comes to the ethics of what they do and the impacts their work may have’. Sometimes it seems that enthusiasm is reserved only for a client service ethos. In 2005, the large national Australian law firm, Allens Arthur Robinson (‘Allens’) won the Business Review Weekly – St George ‘Client Choice’ awards for being best large law firm, and also best large professional services firm of the year. The managing partner was quoted explaining how the firm had won these accolades:

This subservient attitude has obvious negative impacts on lawyers’ own wellbeing, their ability to engage in caring relationships with their friends and families and to spend time cultivating their own personal ethical and political beliefs. It also means they have little free time and thought to devote to learning about and coming to an opinion on important social, environmental and justice issues and getting involved in action on those causes.

Introduction

At the start of this book, four approaches to how we might decide what is ethical behaviour for lawyers were introduced. Zealous, client-focused lawyering – adversarial advocacy – was contrasted with lawyering that counterbalances client advocacy with upholding the responsibilities and duties of citizens to society – responsible lawyering. A third approach, moral activism, sees the ethical duties of lawyering as being not so much in vigorously asserting clients’ rights, or the Rule of Law, as in actively doing one's best in the interests of justice. Finally, the ethics of care sees the ethical virtues of all three of the preceding approaches as overrated in comparison with the importance of caring for and respecting the needs and moral aspirations of each client, each witness, even each opponent with whom the lawyer may come in contact, as well as actively cultivating their own virtue as a person and a lawyer.

Underpinning each of these approaches are the general moral categories of consequentialism, Kantian ethics and classical virtue ethics. An understanding of general morality enriches our grasp of the strengths and limitations of our four lawyer-specific approaches to ethical decision-making, such that carefully considered decisions are likely to involve both general morality and one or more of the four approaches.

In practice, of course, lawyers can and do move around among these ideal types and their general moral sensitivity. The zealous adversarial advocate might still be dominant, but even the determined and courageous criminal barrister can and does change into the quiet and despairing carer, standing, if they are so permitted, near their condemned client when the trapdoor drops. Consider, for example, the case of Nguyen Tuong Van, aged 25, of Melbourne, who was hanged in Singapore on 2 December 2005 for smuggling 496 grams of heroin through Changi Airport in 2002. His Australian lawyers, Justice Lex Lasry (then a QC) and Julian McMahon AC, represented him fearlessly and expertly throughout his trial and subsequent international pleas for mercy. When those pleas were rejected by Singapore, the two lawyers, who had always acted pro bono out of compassion, applied without success simply to be present at the hanging, for no other purpose but to stand alongside their client.

Introduction

Television and movies often portray criminal practice as the most glamorous speciality within the legal profession. In fact it is among the least attractive to most new lawyers – probably because defending accused criminals can be seen as repulsive and mostly low paying. Yet it is for these very reasons that the criminal defence advocate is usually taken as the paradigmatic example of the reason why adversarial advocacy is necessary, is ethically justified and is fully deserving of our admiration. As one senior barrister puts it:

Because the potential sanctions for criminal offences, such as deprivation of liberty, are so serious and the resources and capacity of the state to investigate and prosecute crimes so vast, our system assumes and insists that an accused should always have the opportunity to ‘put the Crown to proof’ of any charges brought against the accused. This effectively holds the state (including the police and other prosecutors) accountable by making sure that they have strong enough evidence to justify a court deciding to convict. It also maintains the integrity of the criminal justice system by making sure that the accused is treated fairly.

While there are unfortunately a few examples of dodgy lawyers in this area of the law as much as in others, and we must teach by reference to the cases which highlight these issues, we are completely convinced of the moral authority and examples set by the notable advocates who can and do represent ‘undesirable’ or high profile defendants, in the interests of public confidence in the justice of the overall system. The lawyers who represent, for example, alleged terrorists, or alleged paedophiles, or those whom media and commissions of inquiry consider have protected these defendants, receive only limited support from the general public. It is for this reason if no other that they deserve the complete support of the wider legal profession.

It is very encouraging to be publishing a third edition of this book in response to the confidence of our publishers and reviewers, and especially the teachers and students who have explored our earlier editions. This new edition includes substantially revised chapters and new case studies, and more purposefully comes to grips with the contributions of general morality to the increasingly diverse and complex ethical challenges facing law students and new lawyers.

The Uniform Law for lawyers is now in force in major Australian States and its influence is gradually extending to other jurisdictions, particularly in the widespread adoption of standard rules of professional conduct: The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules. As with our approach in prior editions, we have attempted throughout not just to state and describe conduct rules and ethics-related case law, but to analyse and criticise them in terms of their purpose, design, implementation and enforcement, in light of the multifaceted role of lawyers in society as adversarial advocates, responsible officers of the court, champions of justice and caring professionals. At the time of writing this Preface, the Federal Immigration Minister has publicly asserted that lawyers acting for detained asylum seekers are ‘un-Australian’. In doing so, he ignores and denigrates the centuries-old examples of lawyers who have stood up against government oppression in the interests of justice. In our view, those examples and that tradition of lawyer independence remain central to the essence of modern legal ethics. Our emphasis therefore continues to be on the greater moral purposes of legal practice, and we remain convinced that those purposes – particularly as they can impact on major existential challenges such as global warming, corruption and human rights – are even more important to new lawyers’ emotional and spiritual sustainability; and at least as important as the rapidly changing nature of legal work and workplaces.

So, to paraphrase what we said in the Preface to our second edition, we remain convinced that the best hope for the moral and ethical future of our lawyers, and hence our legal system, is for law students and new lawyers to learn early about how to connect their humanity with their engagement in passionate and reasoned lawyering. We hope this third edition again makes these connections.