This seminar will explore current debates concerning lawyers’ ethicality and professionalism, with a particular focus on in-house practice. Over recent years, the unique challenges that in-house lawyers can experience in maintaining their professional independence while balancing client and public interests have risen to the foreground. At the same time, our knowledge of the potential factors driving these tensions has evolved. Insights from psychology and behavioural science highlight the critical role of context, suggesting a dynamic and nuanced interplay of environmental and psychological factors which exert an influence on our ability to attend to, and engage with, the ethical dimensions of a situation.

In this seminar, we will:

• Explore how ethical lapses can occur more easily and less intentionally than we might imagine, owing to a range of psychological phenomena and social pressures.
• Examine how organisational structures and informal workplace cultures may counteract well-intentioned formal systems and lead to lawyers finding themselves in ethical difficulty.
• Identify the strategies we can employ to avoid the risk of falling prey to ethical blind spots and ensure we remain ethically astute.

This session is run as part of the 2025 webinar programme – download the programme to register for other webinars like this.

Schedule

This event will be held in BST