On 3 April 2025, Craig Westwood, Chief Executive of the LSB, gave the keynote speech at the Westminster Legal Policy Forum conference “Next steps for legal professional ethics.” Original speech below, may differ from delivered version.
The ethics consultation to which Craig refers is available here (closes 29 May 2025).
Good morning and thank you, Lord Bellamy, for the introduction. I am delighted to be given the opportunity to open discussions today on this important agenda.
Legal professionals play a fundamental role in our society and economy. Quite rightly, they’re seen as guardians of the rule of law, committed to the effective administration of justice. And high standards of ethical conduct are crucial to making sure that legal services sustain the trust of consumers, underpin the administration of justice, and facilitate economic growth.
This means that lawyers have an ethical duty to act with honesty, integrity, and respect for the rule of law. They must uphold their ethical duties across all their interactions and responsibilities, including those to their clients and, critically, to the courts.
However, a tension arises when a lawyer’s ethical duties come into conflict with other pressures they face – when the client’s instructions or the senior colleague’s request is inconsistent with the lawyer’s duty to act in accordance with their professional principles.
So the question that the Legal Services Board has considered is this:
How can regulation support lawyers to act ethically and in the public interest?
A pause here, for some context.
Background
For those of you who might be less familiar with us, the Legal Services Board oversees the regulation of legal services in England and Wales. This means that we are responsible for monitoring the performance of the frontline regulators, like the SRA and the BSB.
We are a statutory body, created by the Legal Services Act 2007. We are accountable to Parliament, and are independent of both the profession and Government.
In plain terms, we regulate the regulators. But more pointedly, our role is to make sure that regulation is performed in the public interest, with consumers at the heart of legal services.
Another important part of the context, you will already know: the questions currently being asked about the ethical conduct of lawyers.
Lawyers have always had – and will doubtless always have – a mixed experience in the court of public opinion, much of it driven by common perception, depictions in film and literature, and their own positive or negative experiences, or those of friends, neighbours and people they read about.
But recent public debate has been fuelled by reporting of some unethical practices which have prompted the public, and the profession, to sit up, pay more attention, and to ask whether the right emphasis is currently placed on ethics.
For our part, professional ethics forms a core part of the objectives set for us, and the regulators, by Parliament. The last few years have seen us exploring this issue in greater depth, gathering evidence about unethical legal conduct and considering how to respond.
This morning, I’m going to set out for you:
- our findings,
- our proposals to strengthen ethics throughout the legal sector,
- and our related consultation where we want to seek your input.
I’ll start with the problem as we’ve diagnosed it.
I mentioned already that we’ve been conducting research into the types of conduct that fall short of what the public has a right to expect, or which undermine the rule of law. These ethical shortcomings include both unintentional oversights and more serious, intentional breaches of good conduct.
Let me offer a few examples of specific types of conduct we’ve been looking at.
Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)
First, the misuse of NDAs – and their impact on people who are silenced or prevented from seeking help.
Now, NDAs are not inherently unethical. They have an important place: commercial applications, for example, when sensitive business information needs to be protected.
The problem is one of misuse.
We found evidence of NDAs being weaponised to prevent wrongdoings from being exposed. Sometimes these wrongdoings are straightforwardly illegal, such as discrimination, harassment or abuse. Sometimes they are not illegal but cause harm and fall short of ethical conduct, such as bullying.
Misuses of NDAs often exploit an imbalance of power: when vulnerable people feel pressured to agree to unfavourable terms, or when their instructions are not followed. The experience of being subject to a misused NDA can be devastating. Victims report harm to their wellbeing, finances, relationships and career opportunities.
And, at the same time, misused NDAs can undermine the public interest. Individuals whose behaviour is concealed by NDAs can repeat their wrongdoing without being held accountable for their actions.
SLAPPs
My second example relates to abusive litigation practices. These include lawyers taking unfair advantage through excessive conduct – the prime example being strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs.
As well as the harm to individuals, SLAPPs frustrate the proper administration of justice, and they impair public interest reporting. Ultimately, they diminish trust and confidence in the legal profession and the justice system.
Of course, we’re not the only ones looking critically at SLAPPs. As you may know, the previous government passed legislation to allow courts to swiftly dismiss SLAPPs that relate to economic crime.
But at our annual conference last month, Lloyd Hatton MP – who serves on the APPGs for Fair Banking and Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax – made an impassioned call to go further.
He highlighted what he described as the “clear consensus in Parliament” that “lawyers and regulators must take their ethical responsibilities more seriously.
Of course, many SLAPPs never make it to court. The harm they cause occurs at a much earlier stage in the litigation process.
And that’s where we believe that effective regulation can really make a difference. It can create an environment that limits the potential for these practices to take hold, and for that harm to arise.
In-house pressures
The third area of concern that I’ll mention for now relates to the challenges faced by in-house counsel in maintaining independence when faced with commercial and corporate pressures.
How should in-house lawyers respond when their ethical responsibilities conflict with corporate objectives?
This is, of course, a key issue in the Post Office Inquiry and one on which the SRA has recently issued new guidance.
Research that we commissioned into in-house lawyers – the largest study of that community – revealed that 32% of them had been asked to advise on something that made them feel uncomfortable ethically. And just over a quarter of in-house lawyers agreed that there are tensions between the way that they respect their obligations to the rule of law – and the way their employers do.
Clearly, this is an issue – most obviously in working cultures that encourage and incentivise unethical behaviour, but potentially in other settings too.
Three overarching challenges
These are just a few examples of the types of conduct and situation in which ethical breaches occur.
If I had more time, I could talk about case handling strategies that involve misleading courts, making false claims, distorting evidence and misrepresenting facts; or I could talk about creative compliance with the law, ethical apathy, or more.
It’s all in our consultation, on our website.
But when we step back from these specific instances of unethical conduct, three broader challenges come into focus:
- The first challenge is that legal professionals often lack a full understanding of how to apply their ethical duties in practice. This is particularly true when different obligations come into conflict with each other – duties to the client, to the court, to act with independence and in the interests of justice.
- The second challenge, then, is a disproportionate focus on the client’s interests to the detriment of other considerations.
- And the third challenge is that many practitioners lack adequate support to maintain their ethical duties when faced with commercial pressures and powerful clients. This is felt most strongly by lawyers working in-house, whether as in-house solicitors or as members of the employed Bar.
Our proposals
The consultation that we launched last month – and which runs to 29 May – proposes a series of outcomes for regulators to pursue to help ensure that legal professionals fully understand and uphold their ethical duties, and are supported to do so by their workplace cultures.
I’ll summarise each of these outcomes:
The first covers education and training. We want to be sure that legal professionals have the right knowledge and skills about their ethical duties when they qualify – and as their careers progress. It’s really quite surprising how little attention is given, in legal education, to lawyers’ ethics.
The second outcome covers regulatory frameworks – the guidance, rules, codes of conduct, and standards that regulators maintain. We want to be assured that regulators make clear that ethical duties are integral to the way legal professionals should act and behave.
The third outcome relates to the support available to legal professionals when challenged. We want them to be empowered to uphold their ethical duties even when experiencing some pushback.
The fourth and fifth outcomes are more operational, relating to remedial action – how regulators monitor conduct and address non-compliance – and to the feedback loop of evaluating the impact of these measures and refining the approach as necessary.
Our consultation
Again, our consultation discusses each outcome in more detail. It also includes expectations of how the regulators can meet these outcomes – recognising that each regulator will need measures appropriate to its specific regulated community.
But let me reflect on the broad ambitions of this work.
Lasting improvements in professional ethics will require more than policy change. We recognise that regulation – while very important – does not provide a silver bullet.
This is about fostering a culture in which ethical practice is embedded at every level. It’s about ensuring that when practitioners face difficult decisions, they have the knowledge, support and confidence to make the right choices.
It will require all legal professionals – and their lay colleagues – to have a greater understanding of the ethical duties of the legal profession. It will require changes in workplace culture and leadership – not just in law firms but in business that employ lawyers too. And it will require systems to be in place that support ethical decision-making at every level of the profession.
So, yes, regulators have a very clear and important role to play. But this is also bigger than legal regulation. It requires a collective effort, to include business, other regulators, corporate governance, and more.
Together, we can build a legal services sector that meets public expectations, upholds the rule of law, and maintains the highest standards of professional ethics.
The consultation runs until 29 May and we welcome all responses. Thank you.
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