CRISIS AT THE BAR: The Unethical Ethics of Lawyers and What To Do About It

The trouble is not with lawyers, but with their ethical system. Jethro K. Lieberman, a lawyer who serves as legal affairs editor of Business Week, scores the ""Code of Professional Responsibility"" (successor to the ""Canons of Ethics"") whose gaps, inconsistencies, and out-and-out private-interest provisions allow lawyers to set public-be-damned fee structures (which the Supreme Court recently found to be an obvious example of price-fixing) and discipline comrades who dare to charge less; discourage group legal services, along with advertising and self-promotion (a fast-changing area, following another Supreme Court case); let lawyers do great public harm under the guise of serving clients' interests; and provide no effective disciplinary system, among other sins. Lieberman suggests a number of reforms--some obvious, a few ingenious, and others obviously unattainable. Among them are a new code of ethics, ""zero-based,"" articulating lawyers' specific conduct responsibilities; the public assumption of bar discipline; minimizing unnecessary legal practice; a cease-fire on harassment of other professionals and paraprofessionals; requiring public service by all law school graduates (a ""lawyer draft""); monitoring judges; preaching and teaching ethics, and--fasten your seat belts, folks--eliminating the (high) profit motive from law practice. Watergate, consumerism, and the demystification of the professions make the topic timely. But vogue is insufficient. Lieberman, unfortunately, writes with a shotgun. Although much of what he says is clearly correct, none of the farrago of problems he addresses is new; many have been tackled before, often with more extensive or persuasive analysis. While new initiatives in the public interest are all to the good, this particular effort adds little.