<p>Sure. Lawyers routinely lie in court. They are under no obligation to tell the truth unless they are the witness on the stand. If not, misleading everyone in the room is standard operating procedure. Attorneys are not sworn in while they are operating as advocates.</p>
<p>Or take attorney-client privilege. This grand notion protects the client’s from lawyers revealing confidential information to the detriment of the client. The legal profession makes much of the sanctity of this principle and adherence to it as evidence of legal ethics. Of course one major exception to it is that the attorney can reveal any and all information in order to get the client to pay their fee. Try applying that to priest-penitent or physician-patient to get some perspective on the low ethical standards of law.</p>
<p>Or intentionally misleading other innocent parties to the benefit of the client. There is a lovely example of this from the Philadelphia Bar Association (ethics opinion 93-6). In short it concludes that a lawyer who discovers that his or her client is not only defrauding party A, with whom settlement negotiations are underway, but also party B, who is unaware of the fraud, is under no obligation to inform party B. Most of the discussion of this “ethics” opinion revolves around lawyerly drafting settlement agreements with party A that avoid any reference to party B, and ensuring that the lawyer does not purposely destroy evidence of the fraud. Now if those documents were to be discarded by the client after the settlement…</p>
<p>Does anyone really believe that lawyers are not drawn from the left tail of the ethical distribution?</p>