Dear Editor: T&T’s legal profession woefully short on ethics; pound home Her Excellency’s message

“Twenty years ago, the ‘Nolan principles’ in the UK sought to improve standards in public life. These seven principles are: Selflessness; Integrity; Objectivity; Accountability; Openness; Honesty; Leadership. At the time, these principles were revolutionary because they focused on behaviour and culture, rather than processes.

“You’d be hard-pushed to find anyone to argue against such noble values or that these principles do not apply to the legal or any professional in T&T.”

The following Letter to the Editor on President Paula-Mae Weekes’ call for improved ethical conduct in Trinidad and Tobago’s legal profession was submitted to Wired868 by international criminal lawyer Ula Nathai-Lutchman:

In her ‘One Year In Office’ interview, Her Excellency President Paula-Mae Weekes’ prior statement on ethical conduct in the legal profession came into focus again:

“For six years, I taught the course Ethics, Rights and Responsibilities of the Legal Profession. I was disappointed to find that a significant percentage of the students, among them scholarship winners and other high achievers, were lazy and dishonest, had a sense of entitlement and wanted maximum return for minimum effort.

“It was clear that these failings of character had been carried over from their earlier interaction with the education system.”

In explaining her prior statement, Her Excellency espoused that ethics isn’t “simply an examinable subject but rather something that would infiltrate your thinking on the whole as you practised.”

I applaud Her Excellency’s statements because it cuts deeper into the depths of professionalism, where light may not shine on hard evidence. There is something very fundamental in T&T society, that is currently lacking—the effort to walk with integrity and to be straightforward. Everyone needs to listen up, think more deeply about what Her Excellency has said and act positively.

Twenty years ago, the ‘Nolan principles’ in the UK sought to improve standards in public life. These seven principles are: Selflessness; Integrity; Objectivity; Accountability; Openness; Honesty; Leadership. At the time, these principles were revolutionary because they focused on behaviour and culture, rather than processes.

You’d be hard-pushed to find anyone to argue against such noble values or that these principles do not apply to the legal or any professional in T&T.

Not everybody who cuts corners or behaves unethically will be caught and put right by the disciplinary committee of the Law Association. The deeper concerns though are for those not caught and who create headaches and trouble for the courts and their clients.

So, what does that mean? It means that only a small but ‘significant percentage’ of those who are the worst performers will be caught. ‘They cyah ketch everybody’ who fall below the ethical dimensions of lawyering, so what you have to do is pound home Her Excellency’s message.

We cannot wait for unethical or unconscionable patterns of conduct to surface at the entry points of the legal profession or to come into focus of the disciplinary body later on. The stakes are too high.

Let’s put in place that moral and ethical education for ‘a significant percentage of the students’ and their ‘failings of character’.