Introduction

Lawyers may owe third party obligations to various groups, as opposed to identi­fied individuals. Some obligations could, in theory, be owed to the whole of society. Consumers, for example, as potential clients, may be affected by the various ways in which lawyers are allowed to generate business.

The claim of lawyers to balance self and client interests with the good of the wider community is one of the key claims of legal professionalism. Any such obligations can be seen as part of a wider ethic of public service, although it may not be expressed as such. The oldest example of an obligation to a collective entity is the duty to the court, which is well established in case law. The field is also expanding to recognise the rights of other third party collectives, such as the general public. This is often, in fact, the state. It is, for example, the duty to the state and to the rule of law that is the central justification for current rules on reporting money laundering. Such duties may also be called upon to justify lawyers acting as special advocates in immigration cases.

¹ RW Gordon, ‘A Collective Failure of Nerve: The Bar’s Response to Kaye Scholer’ (1998) 23 Law and Social Inquiry 315.

In certain circumstances it may be possible to envisage that lawyers’ duties to other collective entities might be upheld. These groups could include employees, pensioners or shareholders of companies for whom they act. Finally, it could be argued that law­yers should have an obligation to assist in dealing with large social issues. An example is where lawyers might help prevent global financial or environmental disasters pre­cipitated by clients. An obligation to avoid such disaster could be conceived as a duty to society, or even to humankind generally.

Wider obligations are expressed in lawyers’ codes of ethics in various ways. Few are obviously ‘public-facing’. The public may, however, benefit from duties owed to much narrower groups. For example, duties to protect the honour of the profession, the public interest or the administration of justice, all benefit members of the public indirectly. The categories of obligation can be divided into three. First, there are duties to the profession imposed by the profession. Secondly, there are duties imposed by the state for the benefit of society. Thirdly, there is a vaguer set of obligations owed to unidentified third party collectives.

II.