Legal ethics: psychology and practice

This seminar will explore the growing concerns around lawyer’s ethicality and professionalism particularly relating to the nature of their relationships with their client(s). Sitting at the core of these concerns is the standard conception of the role of lawyers as partisan, neutral, and non-accountable agents – i.e. lawyers must primarily act in their client’s best interests, need not consider the moral merits of their client’s positions, and should not be held accountable for any moral criticisms they face.

In this webinar, we will:

• Examine how recent high-profile matters have called these principles into question, demonstrating how inherent norms, modes of thinking and behavioural patterns can lead to lawyers finding themselves in both ethical and moral difficulty.
• Explore how, at the individual level, ethical lapses can occur more easily and less intentionally than we might imagine, owing to a range of psychological phenomena and social pressures.
• Identify what strategies we can employ to avoid the risk of falling prey to ethical blind spots and remain ethically astute and morally grounded.

This session is run as part of our What In-house lawyers Need (WIN) programme, part of the 2025 webinar programme – download the programme to register for other webinars like this.