Lawyers’ Professional Independence: Overrated or Undervalued?

This article explores the concept of lawyers’ professional independence in the literature of the U.S. legal profession. It begins with some reflections on the conventional meanings of professional independence, which encompasses both the bar’s collective independence to regulate its members and individual lawyers’ independence in the context of professional representations, including independence from clients, on one hand, and independence from third parties, on the other. The article suggests that the professional conduct rules are overly preoccupied with protecting lawyers’ professional independence from the corrupting influences of other professionals. The article then turns to an aspect of professional independence that has largely dropped out of lawyers’ discourse but that deserves more attention, namely, lawyers’ independence from the courts. This includes: (1) freedom to criticize judges; (2) freedom to disobey arguably unlawful court orders; and (3) freedom to resolve certain ethical dilemmas for oneself, as a matter of professional conscience. The article maintains that as the bar has become strongly identified and allied with the judiciary, motivated by the interests in securing judicial protection from other government regulation and in securing the bar’s own institutional influence over individual lawyers, the bar has ignored this understanding and redefined professional independence consistently with a strong judicial role in regulating lawyers

Eliminating the Audit Expectations Gap : Myth or Reality?

The audit expectations gap is of serious concern to the UK accounting profession with the Department of Trade and Industry proposing a new framework for independent regulation of the accounting profession. However the new Accounting Foundation has had its role placed under review following the Enron collapse and introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002. This resulted in responsibility for independent regulation of the accounting profession being transferred to the reconstituted Financial Reporting Council. High profile failure of financial services firms, commencing with the secondary banking crisis in the 1970s, followed by collapses of banks such as Johnson Matthey Bankers ( JMB), Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and Barings, building societies such as Grays and insurers such as the recent problems at Equitable Life and Independent Insurance have given rise to further debate on the audit expectations gap. The debate surrounding the “expectations gap” often revolves around whether such a gap can be eliminated. Sikka, Puxty, Cooper and Wilmott argue that within a social context, the expectations gap will be difficult to eliminate due to social conflict and the fact that the meaning of social practices is always subject to challenges. It will however, be argued that even though the whole component definition of an audit may be subject to changes and challenges and therefore cannot be objective, elements within the definition of an audit and in particular, the fraud and error detection role of an audit can be relatively objective.Expectations; gap; audit

The significance of work allocation in the professional apprenticeship of solicitors

It is a peculiarity of the solicitors’ profession that it has historically relied on methods of pre-qualification ‘training’ by way of apprenticeship and that an entirely respectable non-graduate route into the profession remains. In a political context, however, where the profession is called upon positively to demonstrate its standards of performance, the professional regulator seeks to attach a competence framework to the existing model; shifting the focus from how the trainee learns to what the trainee learns. This paper will explore the period of traineeship from the perspective of the trainees themselves, drawing on two small qualitative studies, focussing on the fundamental context factor of the allocation and structuring of their work. In the first study the context for this evaluation is the set of outcomes being tested by the professional regulator and in the second, the perceptions of qualified individuals looking back at their apprenticeship, The paper concludes that there remains work for the profession to do not only in fostering supportive and expansive apprenticeships, but in attending, however, supportive the surrounding environment, to the work being carried out by trainees and its relationship with the work carried out by newly qualified solicitors

The Future of Legal Ethics

Dissatisfaction with lawyers is a chronic grievance, and inspires periodiccalls for reform. Nevertheless, the contemporary problems of the Americanlegal profession seem to run deeper than in the past

THE ROLE OF THE ACCOUNTANCY PROFESSIONAL BODIES IN DEVELOPING SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTING

In March 2010, the European Commission renewed its strategy to promote Corporate Social Responsibility in order to ensure long term employee and consumer trust. Corporate Social Responsibility is considered more relevant in the context of the economic crisis because it can help to build (and rebuild) trust in business and to identify new forms of value creation based on addressing societal challenges, which may represent a way out of the crisis. A priority area is repesented by companies' transparency on environmental and social issues. This research aims to assess the involvement of the professional accountancy bodies in the development of social and environmental reporting. After a review of research studies on corporate social and environmental disclosure and the role of the accounting profession in this context, the research identifies the strategies, policies and actions taken by the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) and of the Federation of European Expert Accountants (FEE) based on content analysis of public documents issued by the two bodies. The cases were selected having the influence exerted by the two organisms on other professional bodies and their ability to trace the strategic lines of the accounting profession at the international and European level. The basis upon which the accounting profession was founded and continues to exist is public trust, which is the degree to which the public has confidence in the services provided by the accounting profession. Society is currently expressing high demands on the discipline of accounting and therefore the profession is under pressure to expand its horizons to better reflect these demands. The research revealed that both accounting bodies had an intense activity and initiated political actions in the corporate social and environmental reporting field including sustainability in their strategic objectives. The following areas of involvement have been identified: issuance of assurance, education and ethics standards (in the case of IFAC which is also regulator), educational and web materials, participation in working parties, cooperation with other organisations in the development of reporting and assurance standards, research projects to support decision making, encouraging member bodies to develop similar policies, public statements inviting responsible parties to act. Based on its conclusions the study identifies some research directions to be developed. Academic and professional curricula of Romanian accountants could be analysed in order to determine how they could be improved in order to respond better to these societal requirements.This study identifies the political actions of main profesional bodies (IFAC and FEE) that might influence the actions of other bodies and future profile of accountants.Social and environmental reporting, accountancy profession, professional bodies