Effective encouragement of lawyers' ethical behaviour is important, not just to the basic functionality of the legal system, but also to public confidence in its operation. The legal profession acknowledges and to some degree compensates the community for lawyers' mistakes – that is, negligence – but our moral failures as lawyers are imperfectly anticipated and far more damaging. In Australia, recent examples of flawed behaviour include notorious cases of excessive adversarialism, particularly in the abuse of legal process, in efforts to evade payment of compensation to injured persons via document destruction and to hide corporate bribes paid to Saddam Hussein's former Iraqi regime.

Internationally, confidence in lawyers' probity is now so eroded that courts are increasingly wary of automatic reliance on their integrity. But this scrutiny cannot and must not lead us to deny our vulnerability or, at the other extreme, lose our self-confidence. More than ever, ethical legal practitioners are essential to public confidence in the complex governance of modern societies. And the prospects for ‘inoculating’ lawyers to improve behaviour are promising. While external regulators' scrutiny cannot often identify our dishonest colleagues in advance of their misdeeds, the far larger problem of ethics apathy or oversimplification can be tackled before damage becomes irreversible. Our law societies and bar associations can approach colleagues' confusion and even ignorance of ethics by pre-emptively assessing and periodically reassessing their ethical sophistication in the interests of the community, the economy and especially, ourselves.