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 regulation and as a result, an interest in tools which seek to deepen understandings of ethics has grown. Systematic understanding of ethics in the legal services market is remarkably thin. Debate about ethics is often based on anecdote and argument and where it is evidenced at all it usually derives from data on complaints and regulatory enforcement. These are limited sources, subject to limited analysis. Some more detailed specific analyses have been undertaken relevant to particular market sectors (wills) or themes (referral fees). This document reviews how empirical research can be used to track ethics across a legal services market consisting of a range of different markets and provider types, both professional and non-professional.