The Case Against Legal Culture
Introduction: Why Is 1,000 Lawyers at the Bottom of the Ocean a Good Start?
I’ve spent a lifetime working in consulting, economics, and public policy—fields where professional standards matter, and where ethical lapses have real consequences. Over the years, I’ve come to understand lawyer jokes[1] not as cheap shots, but as cultural diagnostics. They reflect something serious: a widespread unease with how the legal profession treats its own clients.
Q: What do you call 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start.
It’s a punchline that circulates in boardrooms, barbecues, and court waiting rooms. But beneath the laughter is something darker—a shared recognition that engaging a lawyer often feels adversarial, opaque, and disempowering. The joke doesn’t target courtroom theatrics. It targets the experience of being the client of a legal practice.
In early 2024, I was threatened by my (then) romantic partner. She attempted to blackmail me into supporting her spouse visa application—leveraging immigration fraud as part of a broader behavioural pattern of coercive control and relationship fraud. She threatened to have criminal gangs from her ethnic group as well as her family members stab me and kill me if I ever left her, and if I failed to give her the immigration visa she sought. When I refused to be blackmailed into a spousal relationship, she threatened to make false criminal allegations against me to the police. This is all documented in text messages we exchanged.
Her Plan A was a spouse visa, with me being trapped in an abusive relationship of coercive control. Her Plan B involved gaining fraudulent access to a visa class designed to assist genuine victims of domestic violence, with me presumably being framed by her false allegations. After a few months of reflection, I now believe there never really was a Plan A.
When a friend warned me that the verbal threat had progressed from threatening language to active betrayal, I sought legal help and fled the apartment. I engaged a criminal defence firm in the hope of securing protection and strategic guidance.
The abuse escalated. Over the three days after I fled the apartment she sent more than 530 harassing messages—texts and calls designed to destabilise and intimidate. She begged me to return – I still have the voicemails. I reported the abuse to police. She was arrested and questioned. It was during that process that she made what were clearly false and retaliatory allegations against me (only 2 days after begging me to return!!).
I instructed my lawyer to subpoena CCTV footage of one of the assaults that occurred in public—footage that would have corroborated my account and exposed the violence I endured. My lawyer failed to follow that instruction. When I discovered this several months later, she explained that she had wanted to review the footage before tabling it as evidence. She insinuated that she suspected it could have shown me retaliating physically, so she preferred to suppress the footage. That evidence was permanently lost due to her inaction.
My own lawyer insisted that I invoke my ‘right to silence’ even after I formally instructed her that I had absolutely nothing to hide, that the more independent evidence we could elicit the better, and that I could confidently say (having studied relevant law at masters and LLB level) that I had done absolutely nothing wrong at all ever to my ex, much less anything illegal. My lawyer’s advice, from a place of ignorance of the facts of the case, was that I should not brief her and should not report the abuse I suffered to the police because “no male victim of DV can get a fair hearing from the NSW Police.”
Surely it must be a breach of professional duty for a lawyer to give a client legal advice without any knowledge of the relevant facts? Surely if the lawyer is to communicate this to the client, it must be framed as ‘company policy’ or ‘normal strategy’ for the client to accept or reject. It can’t be ‘legal advice’ if the lawyer has no facts on which to base their advice.
At that point, I reached out to a senior partner in the firm—a female practitioner with the authority to intervene. She did nothing. There was no process, no accountability, no remedy.
When I insisted that my lawyer allow me to brief her on the relevant facts of my case, she then told me that our relationship had broken down. She offered to refer me to another lawyer in the firm—but said she had already consulted her colleagues, and they all agreed with her advice: not to brief them. I was effectively blacklisted within the firm I had engaged to protect me.
My own lawyer prevented me from accessing effective legal counsel[2].
I knew I was innocent – I had studied law. I understood the stakes. But law is not my specialty. When I engage a lawyer, I expect mutual respect and strategic collaboration. I expect to be heard. And I expect my rights—including my right to brief counsel[3]—to be respected.
That expectation was not met. And the consequences were nearly fatal for me. I was driven to the edge of suicide, diagnosed with heart failure, and have now had a pacemaker/defibrillator fitted following my 7th emergency admission to hospital in around 8 months.
The Right to Be Heard: When Counsel Refuses to Listen
Lawyers are trained to advocate. But advocacy begins with listening. In my case, I held the facts—facts that could only come from me. Yet my lawyer refused to allow me to brief her. She claimed that hearing the facts could “freeze the defence.” She did not advise me of my legal right to speak—only my right to silence. When I insisted on speaking the truth, she framed me as non-compliant.
The notion that me briefing my lawyer could “freeze the defence” comes from the lawyer’s obligation to act as an officer of the court – if a client tells her one version of events which is subsequently contradicted by independent evidence, she is constrained from asking that client to try again with a different version. Given that clients sometimes lie, from the lawyer’s perspective, it’s often best to have all the evidence on the table before compiling a response. This ensures they are not constrained in their subsequent ability to weave a defence between points of objective evidence. A cynic might say lawyers help their guilty clients to better craft their lies – their obligation to the court and the justice system in this game of footsies is at best ambiguous. It was my lawyer’s advice that I play this game.
But I only have one version of my story – the truth. And the truth is that I am the victim of a relationship fraud, a visa scam, and malicious false allegations.
My lawyer insisted that I not brief her, that I let my abusive ex do all the talking, and that I refuse to speak to police. That I wait to be charged, arrested and jailed based on my Ex’s false allegations. My lawyer’s advice was that, given the gravity of the allegations, I could expect to be denied bail. Only after all of that, would she permit me to brief her – after she received the brief of evidence from the prosecutor.
It is a sad indictment of the legal profession if that is genuinely the optimal strategy for a lawyer engaged to assist a male victim of domestic violence, fraud and blackmail. Can someone better versed in the arcane rules of this silly game lawyers have constructed recommend a reform that better serves the needs of clients and the community? It does not serve justice for victims to be forced to play by these rules, with these stratagems.
Actually, this was not legal strategy. It was strategic disengagement masquerading as professionalism. Had I followed her advice, I believe I would have been charged with horrendous crimes carrying a potential penalty of decades in prison and costing hundreds of thousands of dollars just to defend.
Of course, there is an inherent conflict of interest at work here. Me facing a trial for such false claims would have been a reputational and financial win for my lawyer—a high-profile case, billable hours, courtroom theatre, the opportunity for plenty of Perry Mason moments. For me, it would have meant public shame (even when I was ultimately exonerated), financial devastation, and the collapse of my professional standing.
For better or worse, I decided not to play their game. I made the decision to speak to police after consulting another criminal lawyer. I provided a full account of the relationship to police—seven hours of interrogation, as well as providing text messages, photos, videos and phone messages that all corroborated my account. All evidence that my first lawyer refused to even be informed of, let alone review.
At this point, it is my abusive ex who has been charged—not me. That outcome should have been my lawyer’s goal. Instead, she obstructed it. Police say they are still investigating the allegations made by my Ex – she has been changing her story and drip-feeding manufactured evidence in order to drag out the process, to inflict more pain, and to retain access to her temporary visa extension. Presumably police are also investigating the possibility of charging my Ex with making a false statement. But I’m left living in fear. The abuse continues. There’s a name for this – it’s called ‘systems abuse’ when the abuser uses the legal and judicial system as a weapon, and it’s now illegal in NSW[4] yet the police have chosen not to investigate this aspect of her behaviour. Yet.
I’m sure my lawyer thought she was protecting a potentially guilty client by playing footsies with her obligations as an officer of the court[5]. She clearly wanted to protect me from saying something that I might later want to withdraw. Although the relationship between client and lawyer is confidential (so she would never be compelled to testify about what I told her in confidence) her obligations to the court means that she can’t let a client run through multiple versions of events, just to land on the version that best suits the evidence ultimately served. She is constrained from knowingly eliciting false testimony in court. She also didn’t want to subpoena CCTV footage when she didn’t know what it might show – in her mind, it may have shown me retaliating. She wanted to remain strategically ignorant.
Of course, she couldn’t possibly know that none of those fears were relevant to my case because she refused to hear my account. I neither needed nor wanted her slippery lawyer tactics. I just wanted to speak the truth, and needed her to help me do that. She imposed her cookie cutter solution on me whilst ignorant of the facts of my case, and in direct contradiction of my instructions to her. I believe there was an element of gender bias that influenced her behaviour and ‘legal advice’. She even subtly implied that my defiance of her ‘advice’ revealed my character to be disrespectful, antagonistic to women. Consistent with an abuser. My own lawyer!
This experience highlights a critical issue that remains underexplored: the need for criminal lawyers and the courts to find a better way to balance competing obligations such as the client’s right to brief their advocate[6], the client’s right to silence, the lawyer’s duty to the court, and the risk of freezing the defence. In my case, the lawyer attempted to resolve this tension by denying me the right to brief her—a decision that caused immense psychological harm and could have led to a disastrous miscarriage of justice. It might yet.
My lawyer effectively told me that all of the institutions that are created and maintained to help victims of domestic abuse and the other crimes I suffered – the entire apparatus of the State – would be lined up against me if I reported to the police. Her professional advice was that based purely on gender bias, a male victim of abuse is treated by the police and by their own lawyer as a perpetrator.
It’s been a long time since female victims of domestic abuse were told to keep it to themselves. To supress the pain and not report, because the system won’t help them anyway. I was told by my own lawyer that not only would I not be believed if I told of the abuse I suffered, but also that I would be charged and imprisoned based on my Ex’s malicious counter-allegations.
Lawyers must find a better way to navigate their competing obligations—one that does not deny clients their legal rights, does not inflict psychological harm on innocent clients, and does not enhance protections for guilty clients at the expense of truth and justice.
Professional Ethics and the Duty to Protect
In my own profession, ethical engagement is non-negotiable. As a project manager and public policy consultant, I am bound by standards that require transparency, accountability, and client empowerment. When I engage with vulnerable stakeholders, I do so with care, clarity, and respect, and in accordance with a clearly documented International Standard for stakeholder engagement[7].
The legal profession, by contrast, often treats clients as adversaries. It designs contracts that obscure scope, inflate costs, and silence client feedback. It invokes ethics selectively—using the “officer of the court” mantle not to elevate justice, but to deflect scrutiny, and to enable a business model that relies on harming innocent clients in order to monetise the guilty ones.
This is not professionalism. It is power without protection. Commerce without care.
Accountability Without Consequence
Lawyers rarely admit fault. They rarely apologise. And they almost never offer remedy. When a lawyer is caught-out causing harm, the response is procedural, not ethical. The client is told to read the engagement letter, consult the regulator, or seek another lawyer. The firm and the profession close ranks.
Professional indemnity insurance becomes a shield that enables the lawyer to abdicate responsibility for determining their own response to their culpability. The lawyer’s evasiveness is reframed as imposed strictures from the professional indemnity underwriter. And the client is left to navigate a system designed to protect the practitioner, not the victim.
I taught my children that if they wrong someone, they should apologise and make amends. That morally grounded response is what I’ve encountered when issues arise with other consultants I manage (who also hold PI insurance). By contrast, lawyers respond by quoting their PI policy procedures—even when their culpability is clear. This is not immutable – it is a cultural artifact of the legal ‘profession’, and one that leverages their asymmetry of power – their knowledge of the practice of law. When they wrong their clients, they avoid any consequences because they have the ultimate home-court advantage – the Court.
I wonder, what do lawyers teach their children about moral responsibility?
Trust Without Transparency
In another matter many years ago I paid a trust deposit to a commercial lawyer in anticipation of seeking commercial advice. The engagement ultimately did not proceed as the project was prematurely cancelled.
When I requested a refund of my remaining funds held in trust, I was met with delay and obstruction. The firm refused to return my funds until I threatened disciplinary action—I had to threaten to report the lawyer to the bar association for misappropriation of trust funds, just to have my unused deposit returned.
It simply should not be necessary to threaten such drastic action. But again, lawyers have the home court advantage and can exploit it in the power dynamic of the client’s commercial bargain with their lawyers.
Lawyers seem to take seriously their obligation to act in their client’s interests only in relation to their briefed scope – the services that they provide. But in relation to their commercial relationship with their own client, it’s every man for himself. And the lawyer abuses the home-court advantage to exploit and extort their clients.
This is simply unprofessional. This abuse of information asymmetry does not occur in other professions, where the service provider acknowledges a moral obligation to impose a self-control, not to abuse the power inherent in the information asymmetry. This is the essence of the professional relationship, and it is absent from the culture of the legal profession.
Professional standards must be amended to specifically outlaw use of information asymmetry to exploit and extort clients.
The Rhetoric of Duty and the Reality of Power
Lawyers are officers of the court. It’s a title that carries weight—invoking impartiality, integrity, and a higher duty to justice. But in practice, that duty is often invoked selectively. Lawyers play footsies with it. They use it when it suits their interests, and sidestep it when it doesn’t, in a dance they all know well.
Ethics in the legal profession is performative, not principled.[8]
In trauma contexts, this dynamic is especially harmful. Vulnerable clients are silenced under the guise of procedural propriety. Their agency is reframed as defiance. A client who insists on being heard is treated as a threat to legal strategy.
This is not principled representation or advocacy—it’s strategic ambiguity.
Oversight Without Teeth: The Watchdog That Doesn’t Bark
After sacking my first lawyer ‘for cause’ I lodged a complaint with the regulator—the NSW Office of the Legal Services Commissioner—regarding my first lawyer’s behaviour. I provided documentation. I explained the harm. The response was perfunctory, procedural, and devoid of substance. There was no investigation into the ethical breach. The OLSC didn’t even interview the witness who could have supported my account. There was no recognition of the psychological harm caused by my own lawyer re-traumatising me. No engagement with the core issue of my lawyer actively preventing me from accessing informed legal counsel.
They accepted and parroted back to me in their initial findings my lawyer’s argument that a lawyer is entitled to sack a client who insists on being able to brief their own counsel. The oversight body reinforced my lawyer’s right to silence me without my consent.
It felt like the system was designed not to act, but to absorb complaints and neutralise them. The watchdog didn’t bark. It has been socialised not to bark by a legal culture that protects its own pack.
This is simply not good enough – the pack mentality in the legal profession has achieved regulatory capture[9]. This itself demands reform.
The legal profession can no longer be trusted to police themselves. We need a legal services commissioner that answers to a broad-based multi-disciplinary panel who are not captive to the self-serving culture of the legal profession. This panel should include representatives of regular client industry groups, trauma specialists[10] and psychologists.
It’s vital that there is a backstop to prevent lawyers putting the protection of their business model ahead of minimisation of harm to their own clients. Lawyers must be taught that this is what it means to act in the interests of their clients.
The Missing Blueprint: Why Legal Engagements Need Project Plans
When lawyers draft their own contracts, they do so with full control over scope, fees, dispute resolution mechanisms, and termination clauses. The client is expected to sign without negotiation, often without understanding the implications.
In every other professional domain in which I’ve worked—consulting, economics, infrastructure—engagement begins with clarity. A quote includes a Gantt chart, a fixed price or fee estimate, a defined scope of included services, and a schedule of identifiable exclusions. Consultants describe their management approach, their strategic approach, their communication structure including escalation pathways if problems arise, and their risk management approach. In short, they provide a project plan for service delivery[11].
Lawyers, by contrast, typically demand that clients sign open-ended hourly rate agreements. These engagements offer no strategic roadmap, no cost ceiling and often not even an estimate, no clarity of the scope—what’s in the estimate versus what’s out—no quantification of the other identifiable items that may crop up (risks). The purpose of this ‘lean’ approach to engagement is that it permits the lawyer to avoid accountability for inefficiency. The lawyer retains carte blanche to pursue any approach—or no clear strategy—and to bill the client for time spent correcting their own missteps.
In any other profession, I’d be able to reject any such fee proposal because it would be possible to find an alternative provider who maintains professional standards of engagement. I am yet to find a lawyer capable of producing the sort of service offer that is standard practice in any other profession.
This isn’t just poor practice. It appears to be a deliberate weaponization of structural asymmetry to disempower clients and monetises uncertainty. Legal services, in most cases, are far simpler than other projects I’ve delivered—easier to scope, less risk, and occurring within a highly-structured, highly-regulated environment. This makes legal services comparatively easy to manage. But this predictability does not translate into clarity for clients because the lawyers abuse their power in drafting the engagement to push all risk onto their clients who don’t have the knowledge to manage the unknowns.
A sound universal principle of risk management is that the party (to the contract) with the greatest ability to manage each risk should bear that risk[12]. Lawyers are the experts in the law and in legal process. It’s time they took responsibility for managing their end of the commercial bargain with their clients.
The legal profession actively resists transparency, preferring strategic ambiguity over professionalism. Instead of a project plan, clients are handed a “licence to bill”—an open-ended engagement that monetises uncertainty and shields inefficiency. Such engagements in the building industry are outlawed, and even car mechanics are improving their transparency.
We should be able to expect a greater level of professionalism from our lawyers than from our car mechanics. The legal profession has normalised failing its clients by valorising the shonks and shysters in their profession as shrewd business operators.
Why does the legal profession resist the normalisation of the provision of a project plan in legal engagements? This is a basic requirement of any professional service provider.
A legal project plan should include:
- A strategic outline, describing the proposed approach to management of the engagement, including whether the client will be permitted to brief counsel. If a lawyer proposes to enforce silence on their clients, the client should know that from the get-go, and be empowered to discuss an amended approach or go elsewhere.
- A defined scope of work, with clear inclusions and exclusions
- A fee estimate or cap, with contingencies and exclusions clearly explained
- A high level risk assessment, with broad quantification of identifiable risks and their potential consequence (even a range of risk impacts would be helpful)
- A timeline, including key milestones and decision points
- A communication protocol, specifying frequency, format, and escalation paths within the firm if problems arise
- A client briefing schedule, ensuring the lawyer receives and integrates factual input
This isn’t radical. It’s standard practice in every other professional field. And it’s long overdue in law.
Toward Ethical Engagement: Structural Reform Proposals
The failures I’ve described are not isolated. They are systemic, cultural, and deeply embedded in the legal profession’s engagement model, ethical framework, and oversight mechanisms. But they are not immutable. Reform is possible—if the legal profession is willing to confront the asymmetry, opacity, and institutional inertia that enable harm, and instead aim to offer the professionalism that clients want and need.
Summary of Proposed Reforms
| Reform Proposal | Purpose | Impact on Clients |
| Mandatory Escalation Pathways | Ensure internal accountability | Clients can raise concerns without retaliation |
| Trauma-Informed Protocols | Recognise vulnerability | Engagement reflects psychological safety and avoids re-traumatising vulnerable clients |
| Plain-Language Disclosure | Clarify scope and fees | Clients understand their rights and risks |
| Legal Project Plans | Professionalise service delivery | Transparency, predictability, and strategic clarity |
| Independent Trust Oversight | Protect client funds | Refunds without obstruction or delay |
| Multi-Disciplinary Review Boards | Improve complaint handling | Ethical breaches addressed with nuance, not constrained by the regulatory capture by a self-serving legal culture |
| Duty to Mitigate Asymmetry | Prevent exploitation | Clients empowered through disclosure – lawyers duty bound to not exploit asymmetry to the detriment of their clients |
| Balanced Briefing Protocols | Protect innocent clients | Strategic integrity without silencing truth |
I propose the following reforms to restore professionalism, protect clients, and rebuild trust:
- Mandatory Escalation Pathways Within Firms
Every legal engagement must include a documented process for clients to raise concerns internally—accessible, timely, and overseen by a senior practitioner or ethics officer. Silence must no longer be the default response to client distress.
Lawyers must take their responsibility to their clients seriously, and respond meaningfully to issues raised, rather than merely closing ranks.
- Trauma-Informed Engagement Protocols
Lawyers must be trained to recognise and respond to client vulnerability, especially in domestic violence, immigration, and criminal defence contexts. Engagement design must reflect psychological safety[13], not just procedural compliance.
- Plain-Language Disclosure of Asymmetry
Engagement letters must include clear explanations of scope, fees, dispute resolution mechanisms, and the implications of legal strategy. Clients must understand what they’re signing—and what they’re not.
When issues arise (such as identified or unknown risks) the lawyer must be ethically bound to act in their client’s interest—even in relation to issues that pit the client’s interest against the lawyer’s business interests.
- Legal Project Plans
Legal services should be scoped and managed like any other professional engagement. A basic project plan—including timeline, strategy outline, fee estimate, and communication protocol—should be standard practice, not a luxury.
Legal practice and court procedures are so heavily rule-bound that these could be efficiently developed by a professional association and adopted or modified by individual law practitioners – there need be no heavy administrative burden placed on the industry.
- Independent Oversight of Trust Accounts
Trust funds must be subject to transparent refund protocols and independent review. No client should have to threaten disciplinary action to recover their own money.
- Multi-Disciplinary Review Boards for Complaints
Regulators must be restructured to include professionals from psychology, ethics, public policy, trauma advocacy, and key client industry practitioners. Legal culture has lost the trust of its client base as evidenced by thousands of lawyer jokes[14]. The legal profession can no longer be trusted to police itself. Oversight must reflect the complexity of potential harm.
- Ethical Duty to Mitigate Information Asymmetry
Legal ethics codes must explicitly prohibit the exploitation of information asymmetry. Lawyers must be required to disclose, explain, and mitigate their structural advantage—not weaponize it against their own clients.
- Balanced Protocols for Client Briefing and Defence Strategy
Legal ethics frameworks must include clear guidance on how to balance the client’s right to brief counsel[15], the right to silence, the lawyer’s duty to the court, and the risk of freezing the defence. Denying clients the right to speak is not a solution—it is a failure of engagement. Lawyers playing footsies with their obligations to the court appears farcical to ethically minded clients, and undermines the professional standing of lawyers.
Protocols must be developed to ensure that innocent clients are protected, factual input is integrated consistent with the client’s rights, and strategic integrity is preserved.
Conclusion: Professionalism as Protection
I did not come to this critique as a disillusioned outsider. I came as a seasoned professional—someone who has spent a lifetime in consulting, economics, and public policy, where ethical engagement is not optional and client protection is foundational. I understand information asymmetry and the opportunity for abuse of power that it creates. I understand risk, as well as risk management. And I understand what it means to hold power responsibly.
My experience with the legal profession revealed something I had never encountered in any other field: a culture so steeped in defensiveness, opacity[16], and self-interest that it routinely fails the very people it claims to serve. I was denied access to counsel. I was misled about my rights. I was treated not as a collaborator, but as a liability. I was not treated as a client—I was treated as a product to be monetised. And when I sought redress, the system closed ranks.
This was not a failure of one lawyer. It was a failure of structure, culture, and institutions charged with oversight. It was a profession that weaponizes asymmetry, monetises vulnerability, and deflects accountability. It was a regulator that absorbs complaints but rarely acts. It was a system that drove me to the edge of suicide—and then doubled down on its failings. The legal profession became my abuser.
For too long, the profession has cultivated a culture of strategic ambiguity—where plausible deniability is not a failure of ethics, but a feature of practice. Clients are routinely disempowered by processes that obscure rather than clarify, contain rather than advocate. The result is a system that treats trauma as a procedural inconvenience and personal experience as a threat to institutional decorum.
This is not merely a reputational issue. It is a structural betrayal. The subtext of lawyer jokes—those weary cultural artefacts—is not about punchlines. It’s about pain. They persist because they resonate with a lived truth: that the profession, as currently structured, is frequently antagonistic to the interests of its clients.
The best I can say in review is that I survived this encounter with the legal profession. I found a lawyer willing to allow me to brief him, and he supported and facilitated me talking to police. I asserted my rights and spoke my truth. And I watched the truth prevail.
My abusive ex was charged. I was not.
That outcome should have been my lawyer’s goal. Instead, it was something my own lawyer opposed. Is it possible she was subconsciously influenced by the fact that me being charged would have been to her advantage—financially and professionally? By the fact that her entire business model relies upon courtroom theatre, where the guilt of the client is not disclosed by the strategy adopted by their defence team?
She says no. But as Upton Sinclair wrote[17] (in a time before gender-neutral language): “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
This captures the perverse incentive at the heart of legal engagement. Defence lawyers give the game away if they allow innocent clients a speedy path to resolution. The innocent must suffer so that the legal profession can monetise the guilty.
Speaking for clients of the legal profession, we demand a better standard of professionalism—and a better balance between the interests of a falsely accused client and their lawyer’s pecuniary interest in strategic ambiguity.
Legal professionalism must mean more than procedural compliance. It must mean ethical restraint, mutual respect, and a duty to protect. It must mean transparency in engagement, accountability in conduct, and compassion in practice.
Reform must begin by acknowledging that the current practice of law is antagonistic to the interests of its clients. We must dismantle the professional reflex to control the narrative. Clients must be empowered not just to speak, but to be heard—in their own words, on their own terms, and in pursuit of justice rather than procedural tactics.
The profession must stop treating clarity as a liability and start treating it as a duty. If this requires greater authority for lawyers to engage with vulnerable clients without freezing their defence, then organise that. You are the lawyers. It’s your game and our home-court. Get it sorted – make better rules.
As someone who has lectured in project management and consulted across public policy and economic reform, I find it staggering that the legal profession continues to resist basic principles of professional service delivery planning. In any other sector, the failure to centre the user experience—especially when that user is vulnerable, traumatised, or seeking redress—would be grounds for overhaul. Yet in law, opacity is valorised, and client empowerment is treated as a threat.
I’m sick of having to express my frustration with the legal profession only in the form of lawyer jokes. The punchline has worn thin. It’s time the legal profession stopped laughing all the way to the bank, and started acting in the interests of its clients.
[1] Marc Galanter, ‘The Faces of Mistrust: The Image of Lawyers in Public Opinion, Jokes, and Political Discourse’ (1998) 66(5) University of Cincinnati Law Review 805, 812.
[2] See Dietrich v The Queen (1992) 177 CLR 292; also
Legal Aid NSW, Client Service Charter (2023) https://www.legalaid.nsw.gov.au/about-us/client-service-charter.
[3] ibid
[4] See Crimes Legislation Amendment (Coercive Control) Act 2022 (NSW); NSW Government, Coercive Control and the Law (accessed 18 September 2025). The legislation criminalises abusive behaviour toward intimate partners that includes patterns of intimidation, isolation, and control. While “systems abuse” is not explicitly defined in the Act, it is referenced in policy literature and advocacy materials as a form of coercive control where legal and institutional processes are weaponised to harm or silence victims.; also
Jane Wangmann, ‘Criminalising Coercive Control in New South Wales: Misunderstandings and Missed Opportunities’ (2024) 47(3) UNSW Law Journal 789, 793–795. Wangmann critiques the NSW coercive control offence for its limited scope and highlights the risk of misidentification of victims as offenders, particularly where institutional processes are weaponised—a dynamic often described in advocacy literature as systems abuse.
[5] Ibid
[6] See Dietrich v The Queen (1992) 177 CLR 292; also
Legal Aid NSW, Client Service Charter (2023) https://www.legalaid.nsw.gov.au/about-us/client-service-charter.
[7] International Association for Public Participation Australasia, Quality Assurance Standard for Community and Stakeholder Engagement (2015)
https://www.iap2.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/IAP2_Quality_Assurance_Standard_2015.pdf; also International Organization for Standardization, ISO 26000: Guidance on Social Responsibility (2010).
[8] See Legal Profession Uniform Law Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules 2015 rr 4–12, especially rr 8 (client instructions) and 9 (conflict of duties).
[9] See John Braithwaite, Regulatory Capitalism: How It Works, Ideas for Making It Work Better (Edward Elgar, 2008) 89–93; also Margaret Thornton, ‘The Legal Profession: Indulgent or Indulgence?’ (1996) 5(1) Griffith Law Review 29, 35.
[10] Liz Curran, ‘Trauma-Informed Legal Practice: An Opportunity for Change’ (2021) 46(1) Alternative Law Journal 5, 7.
[11] See Australian Government, APS Framework for Engagement and Service Delivery (2020) https://www.apsc.gov.au/publication/aps-framework-engagement-and-service-delivery.; also
Project Management Institute, PMBOK Guide (7th ed, 2021).
[12] See Project Management Institute, PMBOK Guide (7th ed, 2021).
[13] Liz Curran, ‘Trauma-Informed Legal Practice: An Opportunity for Change’ (2021) 46(1) Alternative Law Journal 5, 7.
[14] See Marc Galanter, ‘The Faces of Mistrust: The Image of Lawyers in Public Opinion, Jokes, and Political Discourse’ (1998) 66(5) University of Cincinnati Law Review 805, 812.
[15] See Dietrich v The Queen (1992) 177 CLR 292; also Legal Aid NSW, Client Service Charter (2023).
[16] See Christine Parker and Adrian Evans, Inside Lawyers’ Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed, 2018) chs 2–3, esp 45–48; also see
Deborah L Rhode, In the Interests of Justice (Oxford University Press, 2000) 45–67.
[17] Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (University of California Press, 1994) 109.