Bringing the Good News from Ghent to Aix

This paper considers what we know about clients’ views of lawyers and advice agency workers from research in Scotland and England and Wales. New forms of litigation, including conditional fee agreements, set up new areas of difficulty between lawyers and clients and current ethical rules may not cover the needs of new forms of legal service. Blumberg’s “confidence game”, Ericson and Baranek’s concentration on outcome, that sense of fairness which Caspar, Tyler and Fisher refer to and Felstiner’s concepts of “substantive justice” and “procedural justice” all provide different views of lawyer-client relations. This literature provides a depressing picture of the profession against some more positive findings. The paper ends by asking how the needs of clients might be addressed at the professional association, the entity and the individual lawyer’s levels. And the poem by Browning is also considered. The paper was delivered by Professor Avrom Sherr, Director, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies at the European Conference “Towards a New Ethical Framework for a Legal Profession in Change - Ghent.