The Gazette 1992

GAZETTE

JULY/AUGUST 1992

A Profess ion . . . If We Can Keep It

The Honorable Martin L .C Feldman, United States District Judge, was a member of a delegation from New Orleans which visited Ireland as guests of the Dublin Solicitors Bar Association. In the course of a speech to the DSBA he raised some pertinent questions about the future of the profession. You have no doubt received some of the finest education on this planet. You belong to an ancient and honoured profession and I assume you view that profession as having a high social purpose. For it is the Law which is the centerpiece of western civilization. And so I write here about a subject which has long been simmering within me over the years I have been a Federal Judge . . . the incipient peril, as I view it, that our profession, in America and perhaps in Ireland too, is becoming something else. A business. That lawyers in America are gradually but steadily paying more attention to bottom lines, billable hours, and marketing techniques, than to their public responsibilities, to how their work enhances social institutions and our quality of life and to their obligations as officers of the court and of loyalty to the client. It is important that you consider these comments if the same environment exists in your country. But it is even more important that you consider them, if you have thus far escaped the recent American experience, to guard against its occurrence. What, exactly, is it that makes a profession different from other endeavours? The famous Dean Pound of Harvard Law School once defined "profession" as "the practice of a learned art in the public interest".

often implicating issues that bind the very core of the hope for civilised existence; and in the process you and only you keep those conflicts off the streets and from the battlefields. You are why we no longer rely on trial by battle, or trial by ordeal, or wager of law with all its archaic mechanisms. We lawyers are different. In Ireland and in America. Maybe that's why we always seem to be under the higher scrutiny of others. Lawyers have given nations more presidents, public servants, statesmen, philanthropists, charitable and community leaders, than any other calling on Earth. I think we have done so because of an implicit understanding of the importance and meaning of the professional oath. Although currently fashionable aggressive marketing techniques in my country used by some lawyers would take the contrary view, I can assure you that you need not become the head of a charity board, for example, to get clients . . . you need to be a good lawyer and a good person. It is just as simple as that. Not terribly long ago, the spectre of Bhopal, with hordes of lawyers literally swarming all across a country soliciting cases on the backs of those miserable victims, sadly painted for the public worldwide a vivid and ugly picture of lawyers as parasites, not as leaders and role models. From my vantage point, the symptoms I see are widespread. Solicitation, of the Bhopal strain, is only one malady which has infected our profession. Another, in America, is advertising, which in my judgment creates hucksters, not lawyers. The American system is under attack with some in respectable quarters arguing that the attack is deserved, including the Vice President of the United States, himself a lawyer. Who can deny that too many lawyers bring too many disputes into too

Judge Feldman Recently, another famous American lawyer, Dean Griswold, intoned a clairvoyant admonition when the Dean told a group of lawyers, "We have a profession - if we can keep it." Like Dean Griswold, I believe that our profession is losing sight of its purpose, losing the identity of its soul, ignoring its higher sense of calling. Lawyers, it seems to me, are forgetting that the Law is not any less a profession simply because lawyers must earn a living. It is appropriate, therefore, that you as my professional colleagues should be asked to never ignore the fact that you pursue a Learned Art, in Dean Pound's famous words, and that you are not managers of a commercial company; that you act daily in the Public Interest, not out of personal gratification but in the interest of strengthening the very foundation of orderly societies. Those are not hollow words, unless you let cynicism contaminate their meaning. You see, you are not just mere profit billable hours for a given month in order to receive two tickets to the next local soccer match; you are lawyers, obliged to resolve (some in court, some out) conflicts for clients; centres for law firms who are competing to record the most