When they enter practice, lawyers become subject to a broad range of ethical duties and responsibilities. Those duties and responsibilities are continually evolving, particularly in light of the technological advances being made in the digital age and the resultant impact on how and where lawyers undertake legal work and the threats posed to client confidentiality.

This unit provides students with a crucial insight into those duties and responsibilities, including the duties owed by lawyers to their clients, the courts, the law and the administration of justice, the legal profession, their opponents and the public.

This unit will cover the following topics:

• the nature and scope of ethical duties of lawyers in Australia
• the process of becoming a lawyer
• the lawyer-client relationship and the core duties owed by a lawyer to a client, including the duty of loyalty, the duty of care and diligence and the duty of confidentiality
• how lawyers should manage conflicts of interest
• lawyers’ fees and ethical billing
• managing trust money
• lawyers’ duties to the court, the law, an opponent, the legal profession and the public; the disciplinary jurisdiction; and
• types of misconduct by lawyers, both in practice and outside of practice

The course is heavily focused on recent practical examples of misconduct by lawyers, which is intended to provide students with clear examples of what to do and what not to do in scenarios which raise complex ethical issues that they are likely to encounter in everyday practice in their future careers.