‘Chinese Walls’

Abstract

The handling of conflicts of interest has become an increasingly important concern for modern professional advisers, in particular lawyers, accountants, brokers and financial advisors. This concern has become exacerbated because of the convergence of a number of factors, namely the bureaucratisation of many areas of professional advisory work, the emergence of megafirms and large national and multi‐national partnerships dealing with this work, coupled with a customer base dominated by large corporations and governments. Indeed, it is the demand of these customers that partly accounts for the emergence of larger advisory firms. However, the outcome of this process has inevitably created severe conflicts of interest problems for such conglomerate professional practices and large advisory firms, problems that they have attempted to contain through the use of what has become commonly known as Chinese walls.