Timothy P. Terrell, Professionalism on an International Scale: the Lex Mundi Project to Identify the Fundamental Shared Values of Law Practice

• Publication year: 2009

PROFESSIONALISM ON AN INTERNATIONAL SCALE: THE LEX MUNDI PROJECT TO IDENTIFY THE FUNDAMENTAL SHARED VALUES OF LAW PRACTICE

Timothy P. Terrell^*

OUTLINE

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 472

I. THE LEX MUNDI PROFESSIONALISM PROJECT: BACKGROUND .......... 474

A. Lex Mundi ................................................................................... 474

B. Defining "Professionalism" ....................................................... 477

C. The Project's Process ................................................................. 480

D. Summarizing the Results: Overlapping Values Become

Virtues ........................................................................................ 481

E. The Project as a "Sham" ........................................................... 483

II. DEVELOPING THE CONSTITUENT VALUES OF LAWYER

PROFESSIONALISM .............................................................................. 485

A. "Excellence" as a Professional Value ....................................... 485

1. Identifying the Issues ............................................................ 485

2. The Hypotheticals and the Specific Issues ............................ 488

a. Excellence, Skill, and Supervision: Dealing with

Mistakes ......................................................................... 488 b. Excellence and a Firm's Choice of Clients ................... 493 c. Excellence and Inexperience ......................................... 494 d. Excellence and Multiple Clients .................................... 496 e. Excellence and Client Pressure ..................................... 497

B. Defining the Professional Values of "Integrity" and

"Independence" ......................................................................... 501

1. The Relationship to Honesty and Excellence ....................... 501

2. "Integrity" and Client Pressure: Saying "No" .................... 503 a. Integrity as Consistency ................................................. 503 b. Integrity as Psychological "Harmony": When Saying

"Yes" to a Client Isn't Wrong ....................................... 504

c. Integrity as "Substantive" Consistency: When Saying

"No" to a Client is Required ......................................... 508

3. Integrity and External Pressure: The Courage to Say

"Yes" .................................................................................... 511

4. Integrity and Associated Law Firms: Assessing Friends ..... 512

5. The Integrity Hypotheticals .................................................. 514 a. Client Pressure on the "Style" of Representation ......... 514 b. The Client Who Views Illegal Conduct as a "Business

Decision": Appropriate Client Counseling ................... 518

c. Integrity and Responding to Mistakes of Other

Lawyers .......................................................................... 520

d. The Client Who Wants to Do the Legal, but "Wrong,"

Thing .............................................................................. 523

e. Integrity and the "Wink and Nod" ................................ 526

C. Respect for the "Rule of Law" and the Work of Other

Lawyers ...................................................................................... 527

1. The Professional Relevance of the Rule of Law ................... 528

2. Understanding "Civility" Properly ...................................... 530

3. Examining the "Rule of Law" More Deeply ........................ 532

4. The Hypotheticals ................................................................. 535 a. Reconsidering the "Wink and Nod" .............................. 535 b. Reconsidering the "Error of the Opposing Lawyer":

The Problem of Professional Respect ............................ 538

c. The Connection Between Personal and Professional

Respect ........................................................................... 539

d. The Problem of the "Public Interest" or the

"Common Good" .......................................................... 541

e. Lex Mundi's Connection to the "Rule of Law" in

Particular ...................................................................... 542

D. "Accountability" and "Responsibility for Adequate

Distribution of Legal Services" .................................................. 543

1. Accountability ....................................................................... 543 a. Defining the Value ......................................................... 543 b. Accountability and Fees ................................................ 545 c. The Question of a Lex Mundi Standard on Billing

Practices ........................................................................ 548

2. Adequate Distribution of Legal Services .............................. 549

a. Some Neglected Topics: Contingent Fees and Fee- Shifting ........................................................................... 550

b. "Distribution" as Pro Bono .......................................... 551 i. The Initial Professionalism Argument .................... 551 ii. Responding to the "Public Assets" Criticism ......... 554 iii. Pro Bono Hypotheticals: Expectations, Billable

Hours, and Limitations ........................................... 557

III. REFINING AND BLENDING THE VALUES OF PROFESSIONALISM: THE

PRACTICAL "VIRTUES" ....................................................................... 559

A. Highest Practical Value ............................................................. 561

B. Principled Enthusiasm ............................................................... 565

C. Engaged Citizenship ................................................................... 570

IV. THE DANGER OF HAVING VALUES: MALPRACTICE AND OTHER

ISSUES ................................................................................................. 571

A. Professionalism and the Standard of Care ................................. 574

B. Professionalism and Engagement Contracts .............................. 577

C. Professionalism and Advertising and Solicitation ...................... 579

CONCLUSION .................................................................................................. 582

INTRODUCTION

This is the story of a long-running project whose final chapter nearly unraveled all that had come before. As it turns out, however, the story has a happy ending: It is a satisfying and encouraging tale of healthy attention to professional values, even though it could have been one more example of the triumph of pragmatism, self-interest, and risk-aversion.

Despite the interesting twist at its end, the story is worth telling in both chronological and analytic order, putting the entire project in proper context and perspective. The essential message here will be that successful lawyers around the world-busy, driven, and competitive as they are-actually are interested in and enjoy discussing the basic normative qualities of the profession they practice. Values, in other words-both personal and professional-really do matter to the best lawyers, even if this guidance is sometimes difficult to articulate and occasionally quite controversial.

This Article describes the ambitious effort by an association of law firms, whose members are drawn from the entire globe and have both international and domestic law practices, to develop, announce, and implement a set of shared fundamental professional values. This association, called "Lex

Mundi,"¹although not unique in the practice of law,²is nevertheless the largest and, apparently, most ambitious of its type.³Over the past few years, its membership set a typically challenging task for itself: to attempt to determine whether the association was, in fact, united at a deep level around certain key principles that animated and characterized the law practices of its members- principles that were not limited to any specific culture or jurisdiction, but instead crossed all borders and were truly international in scope and character.⁴

In American contexts, such inquiries have come to be labeled as explorations of "professionalism," or the aspirational values embedded within the practice of law that lie "beyond" (or "under") the ordinary rules of legal "ethics."⁵

This review of Lex Mundi's effort to internationalize the concept of professionalism (a project in which I participated) will be divided into four parts. The first will describe Lex Mundi itself and the development of its interest in the values of professionalism. It will summarize the background of the published work on the topic of lawyer professionalism that was employed to define the project that the association would undertake and the general results of this effort. It will also, however, note briefly other academic commentary-rejected by the association-that argues that any project like this is actually a sham. Part II, which is the bulk of the Article, will catalogue the specific values discussed at various Lex Mundi conferences and the substance that each value was given in a series of conference papers and discussions of those papers.

Part III will then develop the way the membership addressed the fact that these values were not neatly separated from each other, but rather overlapped and interacted with each other. It will discuss the set of combined, synthesized "virtues" that emerged as focal points of conversation.⁶

But to assess this effort completely, one must consider the last-second concern alluded to in the Article's first sentence that arose about the project as a whole-a concern quite pragmatic rather than normative-that might have been the undoing, in whole or in part, of much of the hard work and serious thought that had been invested in this exercise. The issue is developed in Part IV.

I. THE LEX MUNDI PROFESSIONALISM PROJECT: BACKGROUND

A. Lex Mundi

Lex Mundi is an association of law firms whose membership is extensive...