Professionalism in a Legal Career

What do we mean when we describe the practice of law as a profession? Law professor Jack Sammons explores the sometimes elusive definition of professionalism and urges those who choose the law to preserve its practice as a good way to live.

If you have decided to read this article, it probably means you are already concerned with the way becoming a lawyer is going to shape you as a person. You are probably already wondering if being a lawyer will be a good way to live your life.


First, you should know that you are not alone in wondering if the law will be a good way of living. Finding meaning in their work concerns most reflective people, and prospective lawyers are certainly no exception. In fact, law students are more concerned than most with questions of meaning. Unfortunately, you will spend too little time in your law school classes on questions like these, but you will find that your conversations with colleagues and with faculty members out of class may make up for that.

Law students, on the whole, talk a lot about the effect lawyers have on others and on communities when representing clients. They are also troubled with the way the public perceives lawyers and they wonder if those perceptions are correct. They are even more concerned with changes in our profession, changes often described to them as commercialization. If they wanted to think about money only, most law students will tell you, they would have gone to business school instead. They came to the law for other reasons.

Concerns similar to these among practicing lawyers have been tagged professionalism concerns by judges and bar associations throughout the country. Unfortunately, if you try to define professionalism by asking lawyers and judges, you will find that it means different things to different people. The differences usually show up when lawyers and judges are asked what should be done to improve professionalism. Here is a brief survey of four views.

For some lawyers and judges, professionalism means a return to more civility in the practice of law. They think members of the bar have forgotten how to treat people and, especially, how to treat each other. Civility was something we lost, they say, when the practice moved away from small cohesive communities and when the bar itself stopped being a small cohesive community. Civility, these lawyers and judges tell us, was important to the quality of our lives and the lives of our clients who would see in us an example of how disputes should be resolved.

For others, we can increase our professionalism by increasing our public service such as doing pro bono work (which means "for the good" but is understood to mean "for free") or representing the public's interests (the environment or some form of freedom, for example) as opposed to the individual interests of private clients. We have lost our public spirit, according to many lawyers and judges. Some of these lawyers see professionalism as a quest for a new public spirit but in a different way. They see opportunities for service to the public in the way in which we counsel our private clients.

For a third group, professionalism is about returning to a truer meaning of the term ethics. This is necessary because we have lost the original meaning. For example, many bar associations have continuing legal education (CLE) requirements of an hour or two of ethics each year. These CLE sessions, however, have evolved into an hour or two of legal analysis of the ethical regulations that govern lawyers or reviews of advisory opinions by bar associations and case law interpreting these ethical regulations. Now, there is certainly nothing wrong with this, the third group admits, and it is certainly something we all need, but it is not ethics in the truest sense. Professionalism, they say, is the stuff left over when we back away from the regulatory requirements of the bar to ask questions about what we should do as opposed to what we are required to do by regulations and law.

Finally, some lawyers and judges will tell you that trying to find out what professionalism means before trying to do something about its decline puts the cart before the horse. For these people, the difficulty in articulating what is meant by professionalism is one symptom of its decline. To them, our profession is losing a shared understanding of what it means to be a good lawyer, of what the excellences of the practice of law are. We are losing the traditions by which we once understood these things. Professionalism, then, according to this group, is an effort to recover such an understanding, and, because it is, it is a term in search of its own definition.

I think this last group is on to something, and it is something that lies beneath all the other definitions. This is the idea that the traditions of the practice of law are being corrupted. If this is true, professionalism becomes our effort to keep it from happening.

Why should you, a prospective lawyer, worry about the corruption of the practice of law? It is not your corruption.

Think of chess players as we think of lawyers, as people in a practice. (The use of this analogy is from Alasdaire MacIntyre's powerful book After Virtue.) When we think of chess as a practice, we can see there are two types of goods produced by the practice of chess: internal goods and external goods.

The internal goods of chess are those that can come only from the practice and traditions of chess. These include the enjoyment one can get from an extremely clever gambit, an efficient development of pieces, or a new variation on a traditional defense, and the development of the intellectual cleverness that produces such moves. You know how well you are doing by comparing yourself to the best of those who preceded you in the practice. Winning defines the internal goods but is not an internal good itself. You do not compete for these internal goods nor do you deny them to others by achieving them for yourself.

The external goods of chess are fame and fortune. These come to very few who play chess. Here winning takes on a different import, and here the goods are something that chess players do compete for.

These two kinds of goods produce very different ethics for chess players. The practice of chess can become corrupted when players seek only the external goods. Take cheating, for example. It makes no sense to cheat if you are seeking the internal goods. In fact cheating denies these goods to you. Notice also that there are good reasons to be civil to the player on the other side if you are in search of the internal goods of chess. You cannot have them without the player on the other side. None of this, however, is true for the external goods of fame and fortune. There is no reason, unique to chess, for not cheating or for being civil if you seek only the external goods of chess.

Our fear of corruption in the practice of law is a fear that the practice is being dominated by lawyers striving for external goods. If this is true, we will lose what it means to be a good lawyer by losing the internal goods of our practice. When the practice fails us, there are no good reasons we can give to new lawyers for wanting to be honest, to serve their clients well, to do pro bono work, and to serve the public. There is no good reason we can give them for wanting to be a good lawyer-and no good way of knowing what a good lawyer is at all!

This is why the professionalism concerns about our practice that lawyers and judges have are also a concern about living a good life in the practice. It is why the shape our practice is in should concern you. The shape of our practice will largely determine whether the practice of law is a good way to live your life. Finally, the shape of our practice will be determined, in turn, by whether and how good people like you care about it.

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