Corrupting the Profession?

No win, no fee agreements are having a corrupting effect on the legal profession, according to latest research from civil society thinktank Civitas, who are about to publish a book on the subject named ‘Democratic Civilisation or Judicial Supremacy?’.

David Green, who is the director of the organization, stated that conditional fee agreements and contingency fees, alongside human rights legislation, have harmed the profession as a whole.

“Together, they have had a corrupting effect on the legal profession and have promoted the politicisation of the judiciary,” said Green. “For most of our history conditional fees were illegal under common law and the strongest opponents were the lawyers themselves.

“Now that we have had CFAs for some years we can see that the fears of earlier generations were understandable. It is now widely accepted that these relaxations of the law have permitted a vast increase in lawyer-driven litigation.”

Green went on to label any arguments that CFAs were a way of increasing access to justice as simply a ‘smokescreen’, and that this has become a handy way of obscuring the fact that the CFAs are a way of exploiting private disputes for money-making opportunities.

He concluded that as a result of this, “the legal profession has become less a vocation guided by a code of ethics and more a business which looks upon particular statutes as opportunities for financial gain. The time has come for lawyers with a sense of vocation to reassert themselves.”

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