In the Eye of the Beholder: How Lawyers Perceive Legal Ethical Problems

Abstract

In our interdependent and complex world, lawyers play an increasingly important role. The legal profession depends on lawyers' commitment to the rules of professional conduct governing how they interact with clients, courts, third parties, and one another. Recent events in both the political and private sphere provide examples where lawyers have fallen short of their fiduciary duties. While scholarship abounds on how lawyers should behave in light of their ethical obligations, our understanding of how lawyers approach these obligations remains underexplored. This article seeks to fill this gap. We conduct an experiment of licensed lawyers in Ontario, Canada where we randomly assign fact scenarios in which respondents stand to benefit or lose from ethically questionable conduct. We find that while a large majority of respondents from each randomized group found the conduct in question violated rules of professional conduct, they were less likely to reach that result if they benefitted from the conduct. And, when asked how most other lawyers would respond, a smaller percentage of both groups thought their peers would find a rule violation. Moreover, this gap between respondents' first-person and peer perceptions was larger when respondents of both the benefit and harm groups reached a higher consensus that a rule violation occurred. These findings provide evidence that lawyers are confident their own commitment to the rules of professional conduct exceeds that of their fellow lawyers. In the real world where actions matter as much as, if not more than, beliefs, lawyers' differing perceptions between self and others may affect their own fidelity to the rules of professional conduct.