Are you a Capitulator? A Coaster? A Champion? Comfortably Numb perhaps? To an in-house profession used to having its qualities of leadership and innovation praised to the hilt, the recently-produced report on ethical standards among general counsel from UCL’s Centre for Ethics and Law is an awkward read.
The report, Mapping the Moral Compass, is the second stage of an initiative to assess the ethical approach of and pressures on the in-house profession. Based on 400 responses, the report documents what was already apparent anecdotally: employed lawyers face considerable and specific ethical pressure points. While those tensions are not obviously more severe than in private practice, there is a far less developed framework to manage them.
