R0bert,

Your equation of a lawyer advising clients that YOU believe to be unworthy of legal representation with a Nazi murderer in a death camp is illogical, reprehensible and shows that you know nothing about the legal system or the practice of law. You provide no information at all to back up your baldfaced assertion regarding the "fundamental wrongness of what a lot of lawyers do for a living". I wonder if you really know anything about what lawyers actually do or whether you glean your knowledge about legal practice from "Law and Order" or perhaps "Erin Brokovich". In fact what "most" lawyers do for a living is not "destroy innocent lives" but help plebs like you draft their wills, buy their homes, get compensation when they are injured at work and procure divorces.

Perhaps you are referring to corporate lawyers that defend unpopular clients such as James Hardie or the tobacco companies or to criminal lawyers that defend murderers and rapists. In that case, everyone is entitled to legal representation, that is a fundamental element of our legal system and of justice. Lawyers do not determine the law and may not agree with it but their professional duty is to advise clients in accrdance with it. The power to make and ammend laws lies with our State and Federal governments so if you disagree with any particular laws I'd encourage you to get involved in the democratic process and lobby for change...but I suspect that your comment is just a generic, garden variety slur at people who are probably more sucessful and hardworking than you are

Lubs try family lawyers. And my knowledge is first hand. Major damage done to my son and myself via a process that is so twisted as to not deserve any respect. I don't have a chance of detailing my concerns with this process but the stunts and misrepresentation I have seen so far are those of someone who takes no ethical responsibility for their actions and appears to have no concern for the harm done.

It is real peoples lives which are destroyed (or severly damaged) when lawyers follow instructions (and give advice on what those instructions might be) regardless of the blatent ethical wrongness of what they are doing. This is not an abstract intellectual exercise, it is about real people being hurt every day.

It is about lawyers advising clients to use tactics which are not only unethical but which increase the level of conflict during a family breakup with a consequential increase in the harm to the children caught in the middle and the other party.

It is also about the kind of lawyers in the personal injury field who use billboards saying "Small injury, big dollars" or words to that effect to advertise for business.

Our society is making wonderful strides for improvement in some area's, in others we appear to be on a rapid slide downhill and it appears to be lawyers in the vanguard of that slide.

R0bert,

If the process is twisted, the problem lies with the laws as they stand, that is something lawyers have no control over. They must work within the parameters of the law and it is up to governments to change and enact it. Representing their client to the best of their ability IS the "ethical" duty that lawyers are under. Furthermore lawyers act on the instructions of the client, they explain the legal options available but in the end the client (not their lawyer) decides what steps they want to take so any issues you have in regard to "stunts and misrepresentation" in a family law matter should really be issues with the other party in that matter and not that party's lawyer.

Unfortunately family law proceedings can get ugly and hurtful, especially when children are involved but that is what happends when people's relationships break down. Blame in that situation should be attributed to the parties in the dispute not the lawyers that are, in the end, nothing but neuteral advisors.

You keep using the term unethical like it is an objective term on which everyone will agree. In a dispute such as this you will find that people frequently cannot agree on what is "ethical" and unfortunately in our legal system (which is not perfect, like any other legal system) "legal and "ethical" are not always the same thing. Again that is not the fault of lawyers. Consider this, if lawyers did not advise their clients that a particular course of action was legally available to them because that lawyer personally was morally opposed to it, that lawyer would be guilty of negligence and malpractice and would run the risk of being struck off

Re personal injury lawyers- first of all it is no longer legal for them to advertise in the way you have described due to tort reform legislation, secondly they are providing a service, for many people that service is valuable as they win compensation that allows them to maintain some quality of life despite their injury.

Lubs, we clearly have different views of the responsibility of someone "acting under instruction". Whilst I agree that the primary responsibility lies with the person giving the instruction I do not hold that the other party is absolved of responsibility for their actions.

I agree that ethics are not clear cut items. It remains the best term I can find to describe behaviour that has some sense of fairness and honesty about it. In my own case one section of the law about property settlements (a failure to register a private agreement) was used to add to the pressure on me to give in on a residency claim. There were also misleading claims made in court by the solicitor. It boiled down to we will do you on property unless you give in on the residency.

I remain of the view that solicitors have a role to play in the way legal issues are fought. In family breakdown's they are generally working with people with little experience in the field who take their advice seriously. I don't have all the answers but am convinced that the approach taken by my former wifes solicitor added a lot of pain and harm to the process.

How long have solicitors been unable to advertise like that? I have seen a billboard with words to that effect in recent months (I'll have another look next time I'm in the area and see if it's still there).

All these posters to the Forum have misunderstood the McConvill/Edney article.

They are basically writing about the practice of commercial law in mid-to-top tier firms and referring to burn-out rates in the Magic Circle, etc.

To discuss the practice of criminal and family law, as the previous posts have, is to miss the point. Perceptions about the legal system gleaned from Law & Order or from your particular run-in with the family law system, frankly, give you no insight into the reality of day-to-day, commercial practice.

While they might hold the strongest grip over the public imagination, criminal and family law are in fact peripheral areas for most law graduates, and most of us never have anything to do with either.

An intresting twist on the theme of Lawyer ethics is to collect suggestions for what to do to my ex's Lawyers. Should we use pliers, anvil, red-hot tongs, etc etc? your ideas please. As is perhaps too common in Family Law, I do not see our child any more. I have observed how increasingly negative my ex became once involved with a fancy family law firm. It seems that the angrier she got, the more money they could take from her, and she ended up angry enough to file a totally false case at who-knows-what cost. Now I've played my part in upsetting her, I'm not trying to exonerate blame, but much of her present distress would not exist if she was able to talk with me at a cafe or other neutral place, perhaps with one friend each present to do what barristers did for $800+ per day in a court lobby.

Now I suspect that it would take a strong willed, almost saintly person to resist the blackness of exposure to angry divorcees and still emerge from the experience with an optimistic and helpful attitude. Therefore family lawyers who do divorces all of the time are very nearly ineviatably going to go through a phase in life where they have crystallized into a black mood with rotten expectations to pass on to their clients. Maybe some family lawyers shake that off and go back to trying to resolve conflicts, but I'd bet that with the dollars rolling in at each sneaky suggestion (how about we do this just in case the other side are bad .. hand-rubbing and fangful cackle to the sound of crypt organ music) there will be a number of black laywers who just aim to stirr up aggro and profit from endless litigation. So should it be open heart surgery for them, with red hot tongs on an anvil, or can anyone think of a better way of removing the problem?