Ethics?The Stuff of Which Digital Lawyers Are Made

• Author: Adam Newhouse
• Pages: 165-172

165

CHAPTER 16

Ethics—The Stuff of Which

Digital Lawyers Are Made

More and more the amount of [lawyer’s] income is the measure of

professional success. . . . Steadily the best skill and capacity of the

profession has been drawn into the exacting and highly specialized

service of business and finance. At its best the changed system has

brought to the command of the business world loyalty and a superb

proficiency and technical skill. At its worst it has made the learned

profession of an earlier day the obsequious servant of business, and

tainted it with the morals and manners of the market place in its most

anti-social manifestations.442

—Judge Harlan Fiske Stone

The Bates decision has forever changed the nature of our profes-

sion. Almost overnight, we found ourselves in the media spotlight,

our actions and affairs under the magnifying glass of public

scrutiny.What was unveiled belied our claims of being trusted busi-

nesses. The subsequent story of our profession, as presented by the

increasingly global and virtually instantaneous mass media, has

sealed our fate vis-à-vis the business community following the Great

Recession.

In particular, the story of lawyers’ looking the other way amid

recurring business scandals has undermined clients’ trust in the pro-

fession. Digital Lawyers have a lesson to learn from those business

scandals. Operating in a transparent digital forum, Digital Lawyers

must guard against unethical behavior more than ever before. A single

slip is likely to be amplified and go viral on the Web. In these digital

times, our role as ethical gatekeepers may indeed be our saving grace,

guaranteeing us a spot in the digital marketplace.

442. Stone (cited in note 37) at 7.

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