PRESS: Growing professional awareness of corruption

Reporter Ruth Green has published an interesting piece on the recent IBA report covering the growth in awareness of corruption in the legal profession, where half of respondents have observed an increase in corruption over the last year. 

The importance of client expectations is highlighted in the piece, where half of all respondents reported having been required by a client to certify compliance with anti-corruption laws and produce their organisation’s policy.

My commentary was on the role and practicality of lawyers in holding high standards:

 “Swallow says that, often, the nebulous concept of corruption can be quite ‘distancing’ for lawyers and there’s a tendency to minimise or even ignore low-level corruption. Swallow explains that when we think about scandals such as Enron, ‘these are absolutely devastating examples and there’s a huge scale. But we also need to look at the micro moments that happen in the day to day. Big scandals start with small things. If you don’t call misconduct and ethics issues out early, then they can creep and become normalised and you end up with a bigger problem’…

‘The symbiosis between in-house counsel and external counsel and how that works is stuck in a historic paradigm,’ says Swallow. ‘Private practice lawyers need to build out their own governance infrastructure for independence and then, when they’ve done their homework, they can support and help in-house counsel with theirs.’

The full piece is here.

The report is here.