Legal Profession in UK Law

But none of them touches the essential issue, which is the need to maintain among members of the public a well-founded confidence that any solicitor whom they instruct will be a person of unquestionable integrity, probity and trustworthiness. The reputation of the profession is more important than the fortunes of any individual member. Membership of a profession brings many benefits, but that is a part of the price.

Every counsel has a duty to his client fearlessly to raise every issue, advance every argument, and ask every question, however distasteful, which he thinks will help his client's case. But, as an officer of the Court concerned in the administration of justice, he has an overriding duty to the Court, to the standards of his profession, and to the public, which may and often does lead to a conflict with his client's wishes or with what the client thinks are his personal interests.

No matter what profession it may be, the common law does not impose on those who practise it any liability for damage resulting from what in the result turn out to have been errors of judgment, unless the error was such as no reasonably well-informed and competent member of that profession could have made. So too the common law makes allowance for the difficulties in the circumstances in which professional judgments have to be made and acted upon.

The latter requires that a lawyer must be able to give his client an absolute and unqualified assurance that whatever the client tells him in confidence will never be disclosed without his consent.

The Council in exercising its powers under the Act to make rules and regulations and the Society in discharging functions vested in it by the Act or by such rules or regulations, are acting in a public capacity and what they do in that capacity is governed by public law; and although the legal consequences of doing it may result in creating rights enforceable in private law, those rights are not necessarily the same as those that would flow in private law from doing a similar act otherwise than in the exercise of statutory powers.

So it must also have been appreciated that complaints alleging inability or misbehaviour on the part of a justice of the Supreme Court would be a matter of concern to the Bar Association, and that it would be likely to be involved in the presentation of such complaints to any tribunal that was convened to inquire into the matter under section 98(5)(b).

Secondly, none of the statements of principle in the case law have identified the relationship of lawyers with the court or the arrangements for the admission or discipline of lawyers as a relevant factor. If it had been, then the English courts would not have recognised a privilege for legal advice which was wholly independent of any forensic proceedings, actual or prospective. Nor would they have recognised the privilege attaching to the advice of foreign lawyers.