Legal Ethics, Professional Conduct and Practice Management
What the paper tests
Professional conduct is regulated by the Legal Practitioners Act, the General Legal Council, and the Bar Association of The Gambia. Questions test the lawyer's duties to the court, the client and the profession, together with practice-management obligations such as trust accounting and conflict checks.
Core duties
- Duty to the court: never mislead it, disclose adverse authorities, and do not allow client instructions to justify deception.
- Confidentiality survives the retainer, but yields where the client consents, where a court orders disclosure, or where disclosure is necessary to prevent a future crime.
- Conflict of interest: a lawyer may not act against a former client in a matter where confidential information is relevant, nor act for two parties with opposing interests, without informed consent.
- Client money must be held in a separate trust account, accounted for promptly, and never mixed with office funds.
- Competence and diligence: keep the client informed, give realistic advice on prospects and costs, and avoid undertakings you cannot honour.
- Discipline: complaints go to the regulatory body, which may warn, fine, suspend or strike off; the court may separately punish contempt.
Worked example
An advocate is consulted by A about a land dispute and gives preliminary advice. The retainer ends. Two years later, B, the opposing party in the same dispute, asks the advocate to act.
Reasoning: the advocate must decline. The earlier retainer gave him confidential information about A's title, and the new matter is substantially the same. Consent would have to be informed and obtained from A; absent that, the advocate must refuse and, if he has already entered an appearance, withdraw before acting to B's prejudice.
Traps
Treating advocacy as zealous pursuit of victory rather than a duty to the court; assuming confidentiality covers a future crime; ignoring the trust-account rule; and confusing a disciplinary sanction with contempt of court.