Projects and research
The Commission’s most fundamental purpose is to promote and protect the rights of legal consumers in their dealings with legal practitioners and law practice employees in Queensland. We achieve that purpose primarily by receiving and dealing with complaints about the conduct of legal practitioners and law practice employees and, when the evidence after investigation warrants it, initiating disciplinary proceedings.It is an important and worthwhile exercise in itself to provide legal consumers a means of redress for their complaints. At the end of the day, however, we will best promote and protect the rights of legal consumers only by learning from our experience of dealing with complaints and disciplinary matters and joining with other legal services stakeholders to help improve standards of conduct in the profession—and hence reducing the incidence of conduct that gives rise to complaints in the first place.
Accordingly, we will:
- analyse our database to identify the practices and practitioners most at risk of complaint;
- contribute speakers to and otherwise support undergraduate and continuing legal education programs bearing on standards of conduct in the profession;
- facilitate, broker, undertake and partner the professional bodies, law schools and others in practical research calculated to improve standards of conduct in the profession;
- contribute to the development of legislative and regulatory reforms and policy calculated to improve standards of conduct in the profession.
The projects described in these pages support those goals. Some of them are discrete one-off projects and others are developmental, and build on pilot projects or symposia to further explore ways in which we might help improve standards of conduct in the legal profession. The projects are categorised accordingly either as completed or continuing.
Continuing projects (as at February 2008)
1. The Lawyers, Clients and the Business of Law Symposium Series: An ongoing partnership with the Griffith Socio-Legal Research Centre.
2. Analysis of the Commission’s complaints database: An ongoing in-house project that, among other things, seeks to identify the practitioners and practices most at risk of complaint.
3. Interactive ethical scenarios project: An ongoing partnership with the Centre for Biological Information Technology at the University of Queensland (and other project partners on a scenario by scenario basis) that is designed to give lawyers and law students opportunities to engage on-line and seek to resolve real world ethical problems arising in the course of legal practice.
4. Ethical Culture Check for Law Firms: The ethical health check for law firms is an on-line instrument that allows firms to think about their ethical culture and how well it supports the people who work within their firm to aspire to and sustain high standards of professional practice and perhaps to identify some ways in which it can be strengthened and improved.
5. Women in the Law in Queensland: An ongoing collaboration with the University of Queensland on the likelihood of complaints against female solicitors as compared to male solicitors.
Completed projects (as at February 2008)
1. Survey on unsatisfactory professional conduct: A project undertaken with the support and assistance of the Griffith Law School that tested how lawyers, law students and members of the public understand and apply the concept of unsatisfactory professional conduct to a range of factual scenarios that are typical of complaints the Commission receives every day about the conduct of lawyers.
Last updated 3/06/2008 1:45:27 PM