Lateral Fires

There is literature on how the financialisation of law firms, the obsession with PEP, keeping up with the Joneses, lateral hiring, and other forces can weaken the culture and ethicality of law firms (See here in particular). And law firms ability to conduct diligence (on their clients' newly discovered dubiety following the Ukraine fallout) has …

Agency over technocracy: how lawyer archetypes infect regulatory approaches: the FCA example

I am delighted to say a piece I did with Trevor Clark, Steven Vaughan, and Alan Brener has been published Open Access in Legal Ethics. Here is the abstract. it's about why the FCA was wrong to chicken out of bringing legal properly into the Senior Manager's Regime. That sentence was too short for an …

Judges ‘returning to practice’ (a footnote)

A quick postscript Monday's post on the following documents drawn to my attention by a kind reader. A Ministry of Justice Evidence Pack on Judicial Pay 2022/23 dating February this year appears to assume salaried judges cannot return to private practice: Salaried judges are unique in public service in that they are unable to return …

Can and should retired judges advise on live cases?

I have written before about former judges advising clients after they retire from the bench. Now seems an appropriate time to ask if the convention that they do not has ended, and if so, who decided and how. The case I am about to discuss raises a question as to whether the abandoning of the …

Independent investigations: pick your own judge

The FT contained a fascinating story on Freshfields investigation (£) into “the Reichelt affair” which it says “shows the inherent tension of compliance investigations — a system of corporate governance riddled with conflicts that is paid for, managed and communicated by a company itself.” I’m not going to analyse that in detail, not least because …

Climate Change and the Rule of Law(yers)

By Professor Steven Vaughan, Professor of Law and Professional Ethics at UCL Laws Lawyers are everywhere when it comes to climate change, whether they realise or not. They lubricate, lobby, legislate, and litigate. They make things happen (the buying and selling of fossil-fuel fired plants; the raising of finance for an energy-to-waste facility; and so on). …

Lawfare: “an industry that hides evil in plain sight”?

A recent Commons debate on “Lawfare and the UK Court System” called by Conservative MP David Davis and Labour MP Liam Byrne is worthy of note. It is long, but also worth reading. Let me try and summarise what was said. The central accusation is that “These people [the rich, large organisations, and rich Russians …

Hush Money: POL and an NDA

Reading Nick Wallis’ immense book on the Post Office Scandal (buy it here, read my review here) I came across an example of something which has worried me for a considerable time. I do not think the profession, or its regulators, take this is sufficiently seriously. It is the potential perversion of civil justice through …

Submissions to the Horizon Post Office IT Inquiry

This is the intended text for oral submission to the Horizon Post Office IT Inquiry made by Richard Moorhead, yesterday based on the work of the team researching the Post Office Scandal at Exeter’s Evidence-Based Justice Lab , with Dr. Rebecca Helm (Exeter) and Dr. Karen Nokes (UCL).[1] I have three points, some are of …

Why the Williams’ Inquiry must not narrow its Horizons

Our latest submissions (Working Paper 4) to the Horizon Inquiry on Horizon is up on the Lab site. It responds to the Williams' Inquiry raising 4 issues about the scope of its work which suggests that someone (the Chairman? Post Office??) thinks Second Sight's Investigations; legal work on civil and criminal cases brought by Post …