What Happens When Lawyers Speak Up

lawyers speak up A recent Chicago Tribune op-ed exhorting corporate leaders to speak up got me thinking. It was by Ravin Gandhi, the CEO of GMM Non-stick Coatings, a company that produces non-stick cookware. He talked about writing an op-ed critical of President Donald Trump’s “tepid response to white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va.” He says that it is the responsibility of all leaders to speak their conscience, regardless of their politics and cites a recent survey reporting that 75% of Americans think CEOs should speak out more often publicly on issues of national importance.

Why Lawyers Speak Up

That got me thinking about the responsibility of lawyers. When lawyers speak up on issues of national importance, especially as they pertain to the rule of law and the justice system, they fulfill their professional responsibility. This responsibility is actually written down in the Preamble to the ethical rules that govern all lawyers. The Preamble explains that lawyers have three concurrent sets of responsibilities: to represent their clients, to serve as an officer of the legal system, and to serve as a “public citizen with a special responsibility for the quality of justice.”

This special responsibility is set out with some specificity in the Preamble. As a public citizen and member of a learned profession, lawyers should:

Seek improvement of the law, access to the legal system, the administration of justice and the quality of service rendered by the legal profession;
Cultivate knowledge of the law beyond its use for clients, employ that knowledge in reform of the law and work to strengthen legal education; and
Further the public’s understanding of and confidence in the rule of law and the justice system because legal institutions in a constitutional democracy depend on popular participation and support to maintain their authority.

The Principles of Profiteri

These responsibilities underscore what it means to be a member of a profession. Jordan Furlong in his new book Law is a Buyer’s Market: Building a Client-First Law Firm (a must read, by the way) explains that the Latin root of the word “profession” is profiteri which loosely means “to announce a belief.” Initially, only three occupations qualified as professions: clergy, medicine, and law.

If you embarked on one of these careers, you “professed it,” maybe right there in the village square, so that everyone would know you were serving a greater social need and could be approached for help. These professionals made lifetime vows to higher powers: obedience and poverty for clergy, the Hippocratic Oath for doctors, and allegiance to the court and rule of law for lawyers. Lawyers still have “swearing in” ceremonies upon admission to practice, stressing that professional status revolves around the principles of profiteri: service, selflessness, higher purpose, and making life better for others.

Thus, the Preamble lays out the lawyer’s obligation to provide services in the public interest for which compensation may not be available, i.e., pro bono service. In addition, speaking our conscience is part of our professional obligation. The Preamble specifically states that “a lawyer is also guided by personal conscience” and should “strive to improve the law and the legal profession and to exemplify the legal profession’s ideals of public service.”