I spent the first half of September in stunning southeast Australia, a long-overdue return trip Down Under (my last visit was in 2015). After taking a few days with friends in Gold Coast, my schedule got busy: delivering a keynote at the Australasian Law Practice Management’s Association’s Business of Law Summit in Geelong, recording a podcast with the Law Institute of Victoria in Melbourne, meeting with faculty members at the University of New South Wales Law School, and facilitating a strategic visioning session for Asia-Pacific’s leading insurance law firm, Wotton Kearney in Sydney.
My most novel engagement in Australia, however, was serving as keynote speaker and panel moderator for a fascinating conference organized by the Victorian Legal Services Board + Commissioner (the state legal regulator) called “The Citizen Lawyer.” I’d like to tell you a little about that event, and a lot more about what the concept means and why I think it’s important for lawyers everywhere.
The Citizen Lawyer Symposium brought together more than 100 leaders of the legal profession in Victoria, including lawyers, judges, academics, and law students. The impetus was rising concerns everywhere about protecting the rule of law; but the focus was on how lawyers specifically possess both the opportunity and the obligation to defend the rule of law by fulfilling their particular duties as citizens.
The word “citizen” threw some in the Australian audience for a bit of a loop. Three people separately asked me why we used a term that Australians tend to identify with the United States. But citizenship, in the sense I’m using it, has never belonged to a single nation. It’s the ancient idea that as a member of a political community, you have an obligation to actively participate in some fashion in its civic life.
To be a citizen is to accept not only that you are governed, but also that you have some responsibility to participate in governance. For my purposes, citizenship includes elements of constitutionality (respecting and safeguarding structures that prevent the arbitrary exercise of power), independence of mind (resisting conformity of thought and cultivating informed judgment about public affairs), and stewardship (ensuring a functioning society for those who follow you).
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, our societies have a lot of problems these days. It seems to me that some of the solutions to those problems could be found if many more people better understood their obligations as citizens and took up their associated duties. Passive populations who believe they don’t have any personal role in the governance of their communities — or refuse to exercise that role — make the destruction of social norms by malevolent actors that much easier.
So, what are those particular citizenship duties that lawyers owe to society? To my mind, it comes down to defending and advancing the rule of law. In practical terms, that means lawyers bear the primary responsibility to:
Uphold constitutional values,
Support vital public institutions,
Enable universal access to justice,
Demand accountability from power holders,
Lead truth and reconciliation, and
Help ensure peace, order, and good government.
Lawyers possess a unique combination of legal knowledge, professional status, institutional access, and proximity to power. That gives us a distinctive, and I’d argue heightened, responsibility to safeguard the rule of law. As I said at the Symposium: If auto mechanics or flight attendants turned out en masse to demand better access to justice or challenge public corruption, lawyers would not only be puzzled, but taken aback: “What do you think you’re doing? This is our job.” To which they might reply: “Yes, it is. How well would you say you’re doing it?”
But the central point of my keynote, which I’d like to expand upon here, goes beyond the desirability that lawyers actively defend the rule of law. It’s that our duty to society, as lawyer citizens, is equally as important as our duty to clients as legal practitioners — that our civic role and our commercial role are each central to our professional identity and should have equivalent priority in our professional lives.
That’s a bold assertion, at least when measured against the everyday reality of law practice. The overwhelming majority of lawyers’ time and attention is devoted to their commercial activity, their client-facing tasks. This is true regardless of whether a lawyer is employed in private practice, in a corporation, or in government: Almost every working hour is spent carrying out activities that solve client problems or advance client goals.
It should go without saying that this is exactly what lawyers ought to be doing every day. But it’s not all that lawyers should be doing.
In addition to our commercial activities, we should also be seeking opportunities to perform civic activities, and thereby to fulfill our unique and essential roles as citizens. I’m not suggesting lawyers divide their working hours equally between client service and civic service. But I am saying that serving society and serving clients should enjoy equal standing as elements of a lawyer’s professional identity.
This is not a widely held view within the legal profession. More common is the belief that civic activities to benefit society are the purview of a small but plucky minority of the profession we call “public-service lawyers.” Legal aid practitioners, community lawyers, anti-corruption advocates, and others — these are the legal professionals to whom the rest of us have essentially outsourced most of our citizen-lawyer duties. Collectively, we relegate these lawyers to the status of “alternative career” — something for the justice-loving practitioner to pursue, while the rest of us get on with the real work of lawyering.
I’m neither overlooking nor discounting the enormous amount of vital and valuable pro bono work lawyers already perform. But pro bono service is still essentially an expression of the lawyer’s client-serving role. The lawyer is representing, advising, or assisting a person or organization; they’re just not charging for it. The civic role I’m describing here is directed towards society itself: protecting institutions, strengthening the rule of law, improving access to justice, and otherwise fulfilling lawyers’ responsibilities as citizens as well as practitioners.
Our failure to properly prioritize and perform our duties to society at large has had several adverse consequences. The easiest example: If universal access to justice were really one of our highest professional priorities, we would not have constructed and continued to defend a legal services system that leaves enormous amounts of legal need unmet.
But that failure manifests in other ways — for example, when government pressure is directed at law firms that make a choice between knuckling under and standing up for their independence, or when a professional accreditor’s institutional authority is threatened unless it abandons diversity and inclusion standards it had previously defended.
It would be unfair to lay primary responsibility for this state of affairs at the feet of individual lawyers. At no point during our professional formation was it made clear to us that we actively owed society particular duties as citizen lawyers. And in few if any jurisdictions has the profession organized itself both to create opportunities for lawyers to engage in civic service and to encourage lawyers to take them on. Our civic identity has been chronically underdeveloped in favour of our commercial identity — and that’s ultimately a failure of professional leadership, enabled by a lack of vision for what the legal profession represents beyond the provision of legal services.
It’s time to rectify that failure. AI is forcing us to ask what lawyers will be for, as more legal production migrates to machines, and how legal businesses will be restructured in a high-productivity legal market. Lawyers and law firms will be redefined over the course of the next decade; it’s up to us to lead this process or risk surrendering the job to others. And we should include in that redefinition a renewed emphasis on the civic responsibilities of the citizen lawyer.
There’s much more to this subject than can fit within a single article, and I’ll be returning to the topic again in future. But for now, I want to suggest three practical ways in which we could move towards the elevation of lawyers’ duties as citizens and the integration of our commercial and civic roles as equally important to our professional identity.
At a profession-wide level, we could start by explicitly identifying the nature of our duties as citizens and pointing out where these duties most need performing. But we could go further: Both legal regulators and professional associations could create channels for lawyers to protect and advance the rule of law and thereby meet our citizenship responsibilities. Here are six examples, tied to the six citizenship duties of lawyers listed above:
Uphold constitutional values: Create rapid-response legal teams to defend judicial independence and constitutional norms.
Support vital public institutions: Assemble lawyer networks to provide expertise and support when civic or judicial institutions come under pressure.
Enable universal access to justice: Fund design labs to develop simpler and cheaper pathways for resolving everyday legal problems.
Demand accountability from power holders: Join monitoring and advocacy initiatives that address abuses of public authority.
Lead truth and reconciliation: Spearhead projects that advance Indigenous justice, reconciliation, and institutional reform.
Help ensure peace, order, and good government: Build public legal-literacy networks to strengthen people’s understanding and respect for the law.
In professional formation, we could begin by inculcating the “citizen lawyer” identity at the earliest stages of lawyer development. Whether in mandatory law school courses or as part of a competence-based licensing regime, instruct future lawyers on the history and importance of citizenship, the profession’s unique obligations to the rule of law, and the importance of (legal) ethics, leadership, and character in forming the foundation of an effective lawyer. Embed deep in the legal education process the equal importance and necessary integration of a lawyer’s commercial and civic purposes. Unifying these two facets of lawyers’ identity at the start of lawyer formation would help produce generations of citizen lawyers ready to serve both roles.
And in the everyday practice of law, we could promote the integration of citizen and commercial identities through a kind of “civic checklist” that legal professionals could review whenever they face a decision of even moderate consequence. Modelled on the famous “Three Gates of Speech” through which a statement should pass in order to be ethically justified (“Is this true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?”), I propose that lawyers pass through the “Three Gates of Civic Duty” by asking themselves, about any serious contemplated action:
Is this consistent with the rule of law?
Is this respectful of human dignity?
Is this compatible with the public interest?
The first question asks whether the action lies within the proper boundaries of the law and legitimate limits on the use of power. The second asks whether the action respects every person affected by it as a human being, rather than merely as a means to an end. And the third asks whether the action could damage the administration of justice, democratic governance, or the integrity and legitimacy of the legal system. If the answer to any of these questions is “No,” that doesn’t necessarily dictate a negative outcome. But it should trigger a careful and deliberate process of judgment, through a more demanding lens than simply, “Does this get the client what they want?”
I believe the “Citizen Lawyer” would give us a powerful framework with which to navigate the period of professional transformation that’s directly ahead of us. It could help prepare us for a future world where people will look at lawyers differently and with new expectations. And it could remind us that our civic roles and responsibilities are more than just an admirable feature of the legal profession; they’re an indispensable part of what makes law a profession in the first place.