Moral Diversity in Corporate Lawyering? The Need for a Civil Law Perspective

After the financial crisis and a range of corporate scandals, the question was frequently raised: ‘Where were the lawyers?’ The standard conception of lawyering (or: adversarial advocacy) has been under attack and it has been suggested that other approaches to lawyering are more suitable in the context of corporate law and possibly even necessary in order to avoid ‘unethical’ behaviour (Parker and Evans 2018). But is, what I would call, ‘moral diversity’ actually feasible in corporate practice? Answering this question requires empirical research. There have been studies on corporate lawyering in the common law world, but in this paper I argue that, in order to obtain a better understanding of its nature and the possibilities for going beyond adversarial advocacy, research in civil law jurisdictions is needed. Exploring this question in the civil law context of the Netherlands would be a good place to start.