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Lunch Hour Lecture | Lawyers and ‘acting in the best interests of clients’’

18 March 2025, 1:00 pm–2:00 pm

Law

Professor Stephen Mayson discusses what it should mean for lawyers to fulfil their professional duty to act in the best interests of their clients.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

UCL Events

About the lecture:

Recent public concerns about lawyers' behaviour - for example, in advising the Post Office and Harvey Weinstein - have raised important and challenging questions about what it should mean for lawyers to fulfil their professional duty to act in the best interests of their clients.  This lecture will address the often unsettled and unsettling aspects of this duty.  It will first consider who or what constitutes 'the client' for this purpose (surprisingly, it might not always be clear).  Despite some lawyers' belief that the duty is absolute, Prof Mayson will then look at its relative nature, weighed against the context of some other - sometimes apparently conflicting - professional duties that lawyers have.  Finally, he will turn his attention to the qualified nature of the duty and explore what might represent the 'best' interests of a client.

About the Speaker

Professor Stephen Mayson

Honorary Professor at UCL

Stephen Mayson was called

Stephen Mayson
to the Bar by Lincoln’s Inn (of which he is now a Bencher and chairman of its Regulatory Panel). After a period as a tax lawyer with a City law firm, he developed an international reputation as a strategic advisor in the legal sector, working on a range of strategic, financial, ownership and governance issues with law firms and corporate and government legal departments.  More recently, he has held a number of non-executive directorships and retained strategic advisory relationships with law firms and law-related businesses, and is currently non-executive chairman of an ABS law firm. 
 
Since 1992, Stephen has also held professorships in the UK and abroad, and is presently Honorary Professor of Law at University College London, attached to the Centres for Ethics & Law and Access to Justice.  He has a particular interest in the regulation of legal services, and conducted an independent review of the regulatory framework in England & Wales from 2018, submitting his main report to the Lord Chancellor in June 2020 (followed in 2022 and 2024 by supplementary reports on consumer harm and the public interest).  He was subsequently appointed by the Lord Chancellor to the expert panel supporting Sir Christopher Bellamy’s review of criminal legal aid, and has recently served on the taskforce established by the Institute of Business Ethics to examine business ethics and the legal profession.