Page 1730 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 6 June 2006
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seriously and would usually place their ethical duty above their own career or financial interests, it would be foolish to think that such high standards are maintained and held by all legal practitioners all of the time.
These model laws give more power to law societies and bar associations in the various jurisdictions. I urge the judiciary to use these laws and their inherent jurisdiction to maintain a close watch on the disciplinary actions of those bodies and guard against the danger that new legal corporate loyalties and chains of command may infect and corrupt legal professional standards of behaviour.
The judiciary is the final arbiter of who is fit to hold a practising certificate and of where practice blurs into unacceptable behaviour. I urge them to enforce the high ethical standards in which law students are instructed at law schools in this country. Amongst today’s barristers and solicitors are tomorrow’s judges. If their ethical standards are eroded during their time as employees of large private corporations, then we will all be the poorer.
I want now to catalogue a few examples of the sorts of things that I believe these laws should be directed towards. The following information is from the Non Smokers’ Movement of Australia website. Both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review carried stories about how the law firm Clayton Utz had pressured a woman dying of cancer into giving up her 1986 action against Rothmans with threats that her family would be informed of her sexual history if she persisted.
Dr Konrad Jamrozik was a member of the working party preparing the National Health and Medical Research Council’s report on passive smoking. After receiving a SLAPP-type writ from Clayton Utz, attempting to delay the release of scientific papers discussing the links between passive smoke and morbidity, Dr Jamrozik discussed his concerns on Radio National’s Law Report. He said:
Having worked in the area of tobacco control for many years, I had seen many colleagues receive writs and subpoenas and so on in the name of Clayton Utz, and I knew that they had a long association with the Tobacco Institute of Australia. And my view was that we shouldn’t as an association be supping with the devil. I’m not interested in having any sort of association with a firm that is prepared to take briefs from an industry that produces a product that kills half of the consumers who use it regularly, an entirely preventable epidemic. I’m a public health scientist, an epidemiologist, I understand, as indeed it’s now apparent, that the tobacco industry’s understood, for many years, the dangers of their product, and I don’t think it does the reputation of upstanding medical organisations to have any sort of association with that kind of firm.
I agree with Dr Jamrozik. I do not think that the ACT government should reward any organisation that acts in such a disgraceful manner, whether they are in the legal, construction, financial or any other sector of our economy. It certainly should not encourage them by employing them on its legal panels. Revenue is their lifeblood. A commitment to triple bottom line reporting would help weight the scales against awarding contracts to firms that fail to display social responsibility. This would send a clear market signal that ethics matter.
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