The Good Lawyer

The Good Lawyer explores the ethical and professional challenges that confront people who work in the law - or are considering it - and offers principled and pragmatic advice about how to overcome such challenges. This book takes a holistic approach that begins with your innate humanity. It urges you to examine your motives for seeking a career in law, to foster a deep understanding of what it means to be 'good', and to draw on your virtue and judgement when difficult choices arise, rather than relying on compliance with rules or codes. The Good Lawyer analyses four important areas of legal ethics - truth and deception, professional secrets, conflicts of interest, and professional competence - and explains the choices that are available when determining a course of moral action. It links theory to practice, and includes many examples, diagrams and source documents to illustrate ethical concepts, scenarios and decision making.

Adrian Evans has taught, practised law and consulted in a clinical legal education context for thirty-five years at LaTrobe and Monash Universities. He was coordinator of Springvale Legal Service Inc. from 1988 to 2000, the largest Australian clinical site. He is both an academic and a legal practitioner, with teaching responsibilities in legal systems, legal ethics and clinical case supervision. He has empirically examined and published in relation to 'best practice' ethics for lawyers and law firms, 'quality' clinical-traditional links in law teaching, client attitudes to lawyers, the values of legal practitioners, the approaches of IBA members to monitoring and controlling defalcations and the ethical environment in which lawyer's fidelity compensation is addressed locally and internationally. Adrian is currently researching values-based approaches to teaching legal ethics, the assessment of lawyers' ethics and systemic opportunities to strengthen the ethical functioning of the legal profession. He is also a recipient of the Vice Chancellor's Award for Distinguished Teaching.