Tag: Bill Knight

The really difficult bit – don’t do it. Stop acting. Walk away.

I was very struck by a comment, reported in today’s FT (paywalled), by Vladimir Ashurkov, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, set up by Alexei Navalny,

[M]y experience in international finance has taught me not to expect moral-based decisions by professional services firms.

What are the City professional services firms with links to Russia going to do? What are their internal ethics advisers telling their management boards? What are the pressures they will feel from clients, their staff, their alumni, if they aren’t already? Are they ready to walk away? Are they already looking for the right weasel words?

Who knows? I don’t – but do they?

20 years ago Bill Knight, who had just stepped down as Senior Partner at Simmons & Simmons, wrote an article for PLC titled Practical morality for lawyers. It is still available if you have a subscription. He referenced the then recent financial scandals – Enron, Anderson, Tyco, Worldcom etc. Remember them?

It’s a short article. It is also as applicable today as it was then, possibly more so. It ends with a clear and simple message,

Don’t let anyone tell you that you are not the guardian of morality. We all are. If not, who? Politicians? Now I really feel safe.

Professional unease

Stefan Stern’s FT column Pssst . . . get smart and wipe out whistleblowing some weeks ago had a telling quote from Dov Seidman, founder and chairman of LRN, a US based business ethics consultancy. After reporting Seidman’s view that ‘ethical clarity cannot be established quickly’, Stern quotes what Seidman told the Journal of Leadership and Organisational Studies,

“Doing the right thing” is not a painless option either. . . I actually think that in many cases doing the right thing is often inconvenient . . . Sometimes that is exactly when you know you are doing the right thing, when it feels so inconvenient.”

I carry around with me a (now dog eared) copy of Practical morality for lawyers by the great Bill Knight, one of the doyens of corporate law in the City. This article is only available by subscription to PLC , which is a great pity as every lawyer should read it. In it he anatomises the dilemma that most of us face at some stage or other in our professional careers, ‘when your client wants to do something which is legal, but in your view highly questionable’, and in the doing of it will be looking to you for help and advice.

As Knight notes

Look hard; this is dangerous territory. One day you’re devising off-balance sheet structures, the next you’re letting the senior executives get rich on them, then you’re shredding documents and, before you know it, you are explaining to your family that you may not be seeing them for some time.

It all seems so easy but sometimes, especially when a valued client asks a favour, and times are hard, it isn’t.