Church Scandal Revisited: Reminding the Client of Its Mission

In terms of the continuing discussion of how our legal profession generally failed to serve a positive role in the context of the priest sexual abuse scandal, Randy J. Heinig kindly cites to our discussion here at the Mirror of Justice and then offers the following thoughtful summation:

“Lawyers can be analyzed to MSG (salt is, by and large, a little too flattering for us as a class) -- they more or less accentuate what's already there. But we do bring a distinctive way of viewing things to the table that can, by and large, be good for the client to hear. In this case, it clearly wasn't. The lawyers at issue appeared to understand the law (its language, its strictures, the way it functions -- too much so) in counseling the client, but had missed the essential purposes of the client. While this is rare, sometimes the lawyers need to remind the client of its own purposes. In this case, the lawyers forgot to do that and forgot, therefore, to ultimately and truly serve the client's interests. They lost sight of their larger tasks and became to pre-occuppied with their own limited professional discourse to provide real counsel.”

(You can read the entire message at: http://www.news-sheet.net/archives/000201.html.)

Using Mr. Heinig’s point as a spring-board to continue this discussion, I’d suggest that the “need to remind the client of its own purposes” ought not to be so rare. Indeed, by making the lawyer’s appreciation of the unique purpose or mission of every client a centerpiece of legal practice, we might revitalize the role of the attorney as an adviser, that is, as a true professional and not merely a legal handyman. If such a conversation between lawyers and clients were to become a standard part of the initial retention arrangement, the opportunity for the lawyer and client to work together toward a mutually fulfilling moral as well as a legal end would be greatly enhanced, and many misunderstandings might be avoided as well.

Let me propose this, as a plan of action or at least a subject of further dialogue: We as lawyers ought to put the “mission” question on the table upfront, asking the client who he, she, or it really is; what is the client’s mission,that is, its reason for being; what are the long-term goals as well as the short-term ends of the client; if we were to look back in twenty years, what legacy would the client wish to leave behind; how may the client reach its goals in a manner that strengthens the clients attachment to others and to society; etc. By being purposeful about the mission of the client or the moral terms of the retention from the very inception of the attorney-client relationship, the lawyer then can shape the nature and content of that relationship throughout its duration.

Consider the example at hand: had every lawyer retained by every Catholic bishop confronted by a suit against a diocese for improper conduct by a priest with a minor paused to inquire whether the Church deserved a different kind of legal advising, before plunging in to provide an ordinary legal defense according to the letter of the law, isn’t it likely that the results would have been different on at least some occasions? To be sure, some bishops might still have insisted upon treating the sex abuse problem as a legal distraction and demanded a zealous and legalistic response thereto. But isn’t it likely that some Church leaders, when encouraged by their own legal counsel to do so, would have been moved to reconsider their approach, rediscover the true nature or role of the Church in society and in relationship with others, and reorient the trajectory?

In fact, given the disastrous consequences that often attended the representation of the Church by its lawyers in the sex abuse scandals, might not one argue that the failure to raise questions of mission and the proper contextual role of legal counse for that client was itself a failure of competence? In conclusion, then, could it not be that extending an invitation to the client to engage in moral reasoning together is not merely advisable but the essence of professional responsibility?

I’ll close this posting with these words from Gerald J. Postema, which seem to me particularly pertinent here:

“[C]ut off from sound moral judgment, the lawyer’s ability to do his job well—to determine the applicable law and effectively advise his clients—is likely to be seriously affected. . . . [T]he lawyer who must detach professional judgment from his own moral judgment is deprived of the resources from which arguments regarding his client’s legal rights and duties can be fashioned. In effect, the ideal of neutrality and detachment wars against its companion ideal of zealous pursuit of the client interests.”