ABSTRACT
Large law firms create ethical quandaries for lawyers and the legal profession because two ethical imperatives co-exist, the professional obligations as enshrined in codes, and the organizational requirements as evinced in bureaucratic structures. The former is agentic necessitating active action on the part of the lawyer, while the latter is more passive in its conditionality. These two are incompatible yet the organizational context does not free the lawyer from professional obligations. Attempting to overcome this situation requires a collective effort from legal professional associations, firms, and individual lawyers.
Flood, John A, The Ethics of Large Law Firms (Elgar Encyclopedia of Lawyers’ Ethics and Conduct forthcoming) (July 30, 2025).
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