About the event

Increasingly legal ethics are reduced to codes of conduct and prescriptive ethical rules.

Legalising ethical rules can shift the focus of attention to a strict interpretation of the meaning of the words within an ethical rule as opposed to focusing on professional conduct.  This has an endless spiral of what Dal Pont describes as “spiritless compliance and evermore-prescriptive rules.”

On the other hand, Professional Conduct Rules can amount to the collective judgement of a profession about the standards to which any solicitor is to be judged as a voluntarily agreed standard that is appropriate by each member of the profession.  The Australian Solicitor Conduct Rules are being developed by the Law Council of Australia and have already been adopted by a number of States including South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT.  As we move to a national profession, it is expected that Western Australia will adopt these rules at some future point.

Mr Houweling will introduce the Australian Solicitor Conduct Rules and compare them to the Legal Professional Conduct Rules that have been adopted through regulation in Western Australia.

Level: General

Once registered for this event using the booking link above, the CPD team will email instructions on how to join the webinar.