Lawyers without Conscience Excel at Drafting Tweets, Not Contracts
For a full year, my office witnessed a recurring farce, with its protagonists changing while the plot remained the same: male and female employees, one after another, brought the same complaint against a colleague whom, according to their accounts and documentation, had made a business of selling promises, only to leave his clients discovering too late that the only case he had successfully won was the one concerning his own fees! Meanwhile, the colleague in question was always present on social media platforms, raising the banner of integrity, delivering sermons on professional honor, and speaking about his professional experience in a tone dripping with wisdom and virtue. One might even be led to believe that he not only practiced law but also held the position of “the profession’s public conscience.”
Yet, the facts and documents presented by the complainants told a completely different professional story: one in which the person with a legitimate claim became the accused, the client became the victim, and the case file vanished without a trace, while the fees alone remained fixed, immune to nullity and unaffected by the statute of limitations!
Despite this, I continued to decline accepting such cases, adhering to a professional principle that requires verification and refraining from rashly engaging in disputes with colleagues. Professional collegiality demands fairness, but it should not become a shield that obscures accountability or grants anyone immunity from criticism and scrutiny. The most ironic paradox was that the more complaints arose about his practices, the more active our colleague became in writing tweets and giving interviews on ethics and integrity! It was as if virtue, in his view, were an electronic service: published for the public free of charge, but not required to be practiced in reality.
If these facts are true, we do not need more speeches about professional honor; we need a modest amount of it in dealings with clients. Integrity is not a glossy brochure, nor a media interview, nor a title one bestows upon oneself; it is a behavior that manifests precisely when the cameras are turned off and followers have left.
The question remains: How do we confront those who don the robe of a preacher in public, only to shed it at the first transaction? How do we stop measuring consciences by the number of tweets, and cease granting “certificates of virtue” to those who are more skilled at talking about it than practicing it? The solution does not begin with tightening digital oversight alone, but with a client who is not deceived by the glitter of words, and with regulatory and bar associations that do not hesitate to activate the guillotine of accountability against those who trade on the trust of litigants and the purity of the message of justice.
* Legal Advisor and Attorney
