Subjects:

Professional Conduct and Ethics

Contents:

1. Introduction: values in practice

2. Alternative to adversarial advocacy

3. The responsibility climate: regulation of lawyers’

ethics

4. Civil litigation and excessive adversarialism

5. Ethics in criminal justice: proof and truth

6. Ethics in negotiation and alternative dispute resolution

7. Conflicting loyalties

8. Lawyers’

fees and costs: billing and over-charging

9. Corporate lawyers and corporate misconduct

10. Conclusion - personal professionalism: personal values and legal professionalism.

Legal ethics is often described as an oxymoron or contradiction in terms - lay people find the concept amusing and lawyers can find ethics impossible. The best lawyers are those who have come to grips with their own values and actively seek to improve their ethical practise. This book is designed to help law students and new lawyers understand and modify their own ethical priorities, not just because this knowledge makes it easier to practise law and earn an income, but because self-aware, ethical legal practice is right and feels better than anything else.

Packed with case studies of ethical scandals and dilemmas from real life 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, Parker and Evans expose the values that underlie current practice and set out the alternatives ethical lawyers might follow.

• Makes ethics material accessible by introducing typology of four approaches to lawyers’ ethics in the first two chapters, and using these to critique law and practice throughout the text
• Almost all the case studies are Australian, and highlight the challenges discussed
• Review questions offered at the end of each chapter are designed to prompt readers to think about the approaches they have been using themselves to decide their own ethical positions