Ethics

Thanks to John Steele for posting Tom Morgan's new paper, based on a forthcoming book, titled The Last Days of the American Lawyer.  It's a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of legal practice and legal education. (And if you're not in that group, why are you visiting this blog?)  He writes:

[T]he interaction of law with increasingly complex economic and social issues will make distinctively legal questions less common and make many of the skills that we stress in law schools less relevant.  Rather than needing professionals whose understanding of law dwarfs their understanding of the substantive issues faced by clients, the world will require legally-trained persons to be more fully integrated into the substantive challenges tomorrow's clients face.  That reality may require that more persons, not fewer, have some legal training, but the training of most people will almost certainly not be today's three year graduate program designed to produce an all-purpose legal generalist.

As for professionalism?

[W]hile many of the characteristics attributed to professionals -- integrity, loyalty, keeping confidences, and a commitment to serve the client effectively -- present highly praiseworthy traits to which any moral person should aspire, those characteristics are ultimately those of individuals, not groups.  It is individual lawyers -- and non-lawyers acting both alongside and in competition with lawyers -- that we hope will act in ways traditionally called "professional."

I think throwing in the towel on professionalism as a meaningful concept that attaches to one's status as a lawyer -- rather than a set of attributes available for cultivation by any individual -- is likely to bring Morgan's vision of the future closer to reality by making lawyers less distinct from other service providers.  There is a role for trust here -- and trust beyond the contracted-for trust -- that must be a distinctive attribute of the lawyer-client relationship, and cautions against equating the practice of law with every other market-driven, globalized "business."  I'm working to develop that idea in a current project.  That said, read the paper!