Response to 'Future Bar Training' Consultation

Dr Steven Vaughan sets out his personal response to Parts 1 and 4 of this year's Consultation by the Bar Standards Board

Corporate Lawyers and the Public Interest

Examining the role of 'public interest' in legal services regulation and its meaning in the context of corporate and finance lawyers in large firms

Guidance and the regulatory space for solicitors

Exploring the use and distinction of 'guidance', in its various forms, as applied by the Solicitors Regulation Authority

Existential Ethics: Thinking Hard About Lawyer Responsibility for Clients’ Environmental Harms

This paper challenges the conventional understanding among many legal ethicists that environmental harm can be a necessary, if regrettable, collateral effect of lawyerly work. It argues that lawyers sometimes do things that cost society too much and that legal ethics (being the rules of ethical conduct set out by regulators of lawyers and broader theories of ‘good’ lawyering) has the potential to act as a mediator on lawyers’ environmental harm-causing action. The paper begins by examining lawyers’ formal rules of professional conduct in England & Wales, showing how those rules require lawyers to provide active counselling to clients but do not fully address clients’ legally permissible choices that may result in environmental harm. The paper then turns to theories of legal ethics that go beyond these baseline rules. Here, I argue that the dominant ‘Standard Conception’ of lawyers as neutral technicians is not only implausible in the context of environmental law but also fundamentally incomplete. The paper also considers the ethical implications of a lawyer’s initial decision to represent a client. The commonly held belief that ‘Everyone deserves legal advice’ often masks a simple ethical choice, where lawyers prioritise commercial concerns over environmental considerations, unburdened by more complex ethical constraints. However, this rationalisation rests on unsound premises and frequently clashes with lawyers’ personal moral boundaries; a problem I label ‘Meatloaf Lawyering’. Ultimately, I argue that lawyers have significant ethical agency and that their professional obligations do not impede (and sometimes require) an active, ethically responsible stance towards environmental harms

Response to LSUC Consultation Paper: 'Promoting better legal practices'

In response to the January 2016 Consultation Paper, Dr Steven Vaughan uses data from his three-year research project, 'The Limits of Lawyers', to examine the attitudes of solicitors and their firms to responsibility for professionalism and compliance

Going Public: Diversity Disclosures by Large UK Law Firms

Following the 2011 Legal Services Board requirement for firms to disclose the diversity of their workforce, this paper examines the implications of this regulatory intervention

Patronising lawyers? Homophily and same-sex litigation teams before the UK Supreme Court

In this paper, we investigate patterns of team formation amongst barristers who appeared before the UK Supreme Court between October 2009 and August 2015. We show that there is evidence of considerable gender homophily in the formation of teams of barristers appearing before the UK Supreme Court. Same-sex teams of barristers are over-represented compared to the number we would expect if barristers paired up randomly. We also show that this gender homophily remains when we allow for the possibility that barristers pair up randomly within their chambers, or within their area of law. As such, the formation of teams of barristers in the Supreme Court is governed by practices and preferences which make same-sex legal teams more likely than they would be if team formation simply involved a gender-blind draw from a pool of lawyers. Barristers appearing before the Supreme Court prefer, for whatever reason, to work with other barristers of the same sex. We set out reasons why homophily in team formation is undesirable and discuss the routes through which different remedies might operate