Iain McKie
Joined: 08 May 2007
Posts: 173
Location: Ayr, Scotland.
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 Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 2:46 pm Post subject: Justice and the law |
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I know lawyers who I would rate as friends. People of honesty and integrity.
I will not name them for fear they are tarnished by association. (with me)
As a profession however the wheels fall off the trolley.
David Maister http://davidmaister.com/ a British born lawyer/management consultant living in America describes professions like lawyers as, “an unfortunate necessity”. He is well aware of the barriers lawyers have to break down to gain the confidence of clients.
In an article ‘Integrity Impugned’ he highlights that initially clients are suspicious about the ‘professions’ motives and stresses the importance of addressing these suspicions.
“It turns out that it is not enough just to be trustworthy. You must also know how to give the client the experience that you are visibly, obviously, trustworthy.”
http://davidmaister.com/articles/2/108/
This led me to wondering if the profession in Scotland has this as a goal. These thoughts coincided with the Herald’s publication of a 50 page insert ‘Lawyers 2007’. A sort of ‘who’s who’ of Scotland’s lawyers reviewing, ‘the performance tables of Scottish lawyers and their firms….’
Undoubtedly potential clients will peruse these tables before deciding where to place their legal business. Surely this was the place to glean some information on the profession’s goals in terms of clients.
By page 4 my confidence was diminishing and this was not helped by an epistle from the President of The Law Society of Scotland extolling the virtues of a society that he saw as willingly embracing change and in the forefront in initiating and developing it.
But I read on - 50 pages and many thousands of words in praise of lawyers and law firms. Words
like ‘integrity’, ‘excellence’, ‘impressive’, ‘fantastic’ flew about like confetti in a festival of self-congratulation. No doubts, no reservations, not a word of criticism.
Then a thought struck me. There’s one word I hadn’t seen. I carefully re-read all 50 pages.
I was right. Not once in the many thousands of words did the word ‘justice’ appear
Not a mention. In this so called definitive guide to what is best about Scotland’s law profession not one reference to ‘justice’, its importance to clients or the part played by the law profession in upholding it.
In the rarefied atmosphere inhabited by some lawyers ‘justice’ might not figure too highly on the agenda but among the thousands of individual clients fighting for their very existence ‘justice’ is a word very close to their hearts.
The cynic in me fears that we have developed a law profession driven by financial reward and self-interest. A culture where success is measured in how far corporate clients are satisfied and where obtaining ‘justice’ for the ‘little person’ is little more than an annoying diversion.
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