Criminal Defense Attorney the Canons Term Paper

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Finally, a divorce attorney may be aware that it is in the client's interest to be more legally aggressive, to gain a better settlement, even if the client's temporary, overwrought emotional state runs against this tendency.

The utter prohibition against active solicitation of clients would also bar much of public interest advocacy, such as lawyers who actively seek clients to challenge laws that they believe are against the public good, like anti-abortion legislation. Public advocacy work, which might be waged in name on behalf of a client who is not the most egregiously harmed person by the legislation in actual fact would further go against the grain of Canon 14: "lawsuits with clients should be resorted to only to prevent injustice, imposition or fraud." (Johnson, 1993) Although seeing consumers defrauded by misleading advertising may not actually be an injustice, to wage such legislation may still be in the public good.

The unstructured nature of the Canons does not "lend themselves to practical sanctions for violations; and... changing conditions in our legal system and urbanized society require new statements of professional principles." (Johnson, 1993) Although some of the statements, such as Canon 6, that a lawyer should represent his or her client in a competent fashion, or the prohibition against revealing the client's secrets, are commendable and are a part of current ethical standards of the American Bar Association today, this language's vague generality needs to be more clearly defined, so that there are comprehensible definitions of what competence entails, or even when a client is in fact a client -- what types of communications are privileged and cannot be recorded by the state? There must also be defined sanctions against lawyers who act incompetently, else how can lawyers truly understand what constitutes a definition of competence?

As originally drafted, the Canons were not intended to regulate the legal profession's conduct according to set standards.

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Thus, even apparently innocent canons such as the statement of Canon 12: "In fixing fees, lawyers should avoid charges which overestimate their advice and services, as well as those which undervalue them," are problematic (Johnson, 1993) This statement is so vague it is virtually meaningless as a functional guideline for attorneys in setting a fee schedule. Moreover, while it would seem to attempt to prohibit running up large amounts of meaningless billable hours in the name of 'rainmaking' for a large corporate firm, it would also, in theory, prohibit pro bono work, or free legal counsel as a public defender or as a lawyer for a public advocacy group that is less interested in making money from clients and for the profession than it is in bringing cases to change laws or to raise consumer awareness. Lawyers who did so would be guilty of 'undercharging.' Even highly pricey legal advocates also often perform pro bono work, and it could be argued that the high fees they charge enable them to do such work.

Perhaps one of the most untenable canons is the canon that asserts a lawyer must strive to improve the legal system. One could argue that representing a client who is a danger to society could subvert, rather than improve the public's view of the profession, even though to take such a stance would violate Canon 2, which upholds the necessity of providing persons with legal counsel. Thus, without further clarification, the Canons are not simply difficult to enforce, they can actually paint a misleading picture of the profession, and provide poor guidance to practitioners.

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