Designing Ethics Indicators for Legal Services Provision

Abstract

Market liberalisation of legal services is being accompanied by key changes in professional regulation, notably outcome focused regulation, prioritised through risk-assessment and invoking stronger elements of relationship management. These suggest changes in the nature of professionalism. For some at least, market liberalisation in particular threatens to weaken professional ethics. Because of the transitions underway in the legal services market, there is a need to better understand the ethics of legal service providers. This report examines ways of doing that. Regulators (and businesses) in other fields and jurisdictions have begun to recognise the limitations of command and control regul..