Nick, a litigator, is approached late one afternoon by a client about a story appearing in the papers the following day. The client says the story is libellous and instructs Nick to write ‘without prejudice’ to the journalist requiring the retraction of the story and raising the potential of a libel claim should it run. Nick feels he has no time to check the accuracy of what their client is telling them.

A law firm has written a Corporate Social Responsibility report (now as Environmental Social and Governance report) since 2007. It writes in those reports about its commitments to reducing its carbon impacts wherever possible given the existential threat of the climate crisis. The firm acts for oil and gas clients on new fossil fuel projects.

Emily is deeply committed to her Christian beliefs. She is also committed to access to justice and chose to work for a large public interest litigation firm. The government is seeking to change the law on abortion to make access to abortion services more difficult. A pro-choice NGO engages Emily’s law firm to work on a challenge to that policy change. Emily has strongly held views that abortion is morally wrong, but agrees to work on the case.

These cases surface a wealth of integrity-related issues: what are the limits of the law and a client’s legal entitlements?; how and when are we consistent as professionals with our actions as compared with our sayings?; and what should or can we do when our personal values and beliefs come into tension with what we think is expected of us as professionals?

In England & Wales, ‘acting with integrity’ is a legal requirement for regulated lawyers (set out in s1(3)(a) of the Legal Services Act 2007); an explicit part of the law of lawyering for solicitors, barristers, and others (seen in the respective codes of conduct/regulatory handbooks).

In the leading case in this area, Wingate and Evans v SRA, Jackson LJ said the following:

“In professional codes of conduct, the term "integrity" is a useful shorthand to express the higher standards which society expects from professional persons and which the professions expect from their own members. ... The underlying rationale is that the professions have a privileged and trusted role in society. In return they are required to live up to their own professional standards. … Integrity connotes adherence to the ethical standards of one's own profession. That involves more than mere honesty.”

While this is interesting, it does not take solicitors and barristers in practice very far in knowing the limits and contours of the legal obligation on them to ‘act with integrity’. Nor do the regulators add much by way of further explanation. The Solicitors Regulation Authority, for example, in its guidance on integrity says:

“Acting with integrity means different things in different situations and contexts. When making any judgment and deciding whether to allege a lack of integrity we will make assessments on a case-by-case basis, recognising that each case is different and turns on its own facts.”

What the courts and the regulators do instead is to list fact patterns of lawyers not acting with integrity: recklessly but not dishonestly misleading a court; making improper payments out of a client account, and so on. Given this, we generally tend to be talking about integrity in the breach. This is not per se problematic, and might sometimes be useful, but the obligation on solicitors, barristers etc is a positive one, not a negative one. It is an obligation to act with integrity.

I’ve recently written about this positive obligation at some length here. For now, let me offer three thoughts.

First, we can see integrity as a cluster concept. It sits as an individual professional requirement, but does not necessarily sit separately to other professional rules and principles. Judges, regulators, and others mix integrity with other professional principles and ideas - independence, honesty, the rule of law, trust in the profession, and so on - because these things are connected to and part of acting with integrity. As such, the requirement to act with integrity is primarily a reminder of an obligation on solicitors to think about their special role in society and what we expect because of that important role (alongside their obligations to their clients).

Second, exercises of integrity may, and sometimes will, be morally criticisable. This could be because of the significance of the impacts of doing the legal thing for a client: the moral cost despite doing the right thing. Criticism might instead be offered because we are wrong about what the professional values are that matter, or what those professional values reasonably mean. Or criticism might be because we are not sure which set of values—personal or professional—matter most (or we get that decision ‘wrong'). Integrity means taking that criticism - withstanding it, accepting, and (sometimes) acting on it. Being able, as Tim Dare put it, to have our views and actions withstand a bit of shaking.

Third, integrity as a concept and a legal requirement is hard because it’s often hard to know what is required in general and in particular contexts. We might think that integrity captures the ‘spirit’ of the professional role, quite apart from the individual substantive rules. But the challenge of articulating the spirit remains, and is worth some further thought.

As the courts in England & Wales have rightly said, we do not and should not expect solicitors to be ‘paragons of virtue’.  But we do and should expect them to act like solicitors. Generally, these expectations will mirror what we expect of anybody else in society: be honest, treat others with respect, and so on. In some situations, we will want and need to expect more (or different) things. What will be required, and when, will often differ on the situation; just as the regulatory guidance on acting with integrity noted above sets out. It is here where lawyers will need, as part of their obligation to act with integrity, to engage in some active (and sometimes critical) self-reflection. The entire regulatory scheme of the Legal Services Act 2007 - and the legal services regulators’ codes of conduct and professional rules in England & Wales - is that lawyers have a complex of duties (which may sometimes be in tension) and moments of discretion. At its core, integrity (like the professional principle on independence, like the professional principle on the rule of law) simply suggests to lawyers what should guide their conduct when exercising that discretion: that they are institutional actors in our justice system with important social roles.