COMMERCIAL AWARENESS AND PROFESSIONAL ETHICS Essay

COMMERCIAL AWARENESS AND PROFESSIONAL ETHICS - Essay Example that professional ethics is a constant feature in the legal profession, modern legal practice has attracted renewed attention to how professional ethics applies to the profession. For example, while discourse on professional ethics in legal practice tended to focus more on sensational cases such as lawyers knowingly keeping a secret that is life-threatening, some modern scholars are advocating for an interpretive approach that focuses on ordinary cases. According to Markovits, using sensational cases to analyze or evaluate professional ethics in the legal practice is contrary to the principle that ‘great cases make bad laws’.1 The purpose of this paper is to assess the content and role of ethics in modern legal practice. Ethics is a broad topic. Even within the legal practice, the subject of ethics covers a wide range of issues and areas. There are volumes of books, articles, and publications on professional ethics as it applies to the legal practice. However, to understand the general content of ethics in the modern legal practice, it is important to focus narrowly on some of the most recent discourses on ethics. In this respect, the paper will focus on the Model Code developed and administered by the American Bar Association (ABA). Some of the main ethical issues contain the Model Code of client-lawyer relationship, professional integrity, and information management. It is worth noting that the Model Code has undergone various revisions to fit the modern legal practice because the original canons were specifically meant for the legal practice in the past.2 Under professional ethics for practicing lawyers, one of the fundamental principles is the need for a professional and confidential relationship between the lawyer and the client. Under this ethical principle, several issues are covered including confidentiality, fees, conflicts of interest, and professionalism. For instance, it would be considered unethical for a lawyer to engage with a client with whom