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That is indisputable, but a harsher judgment ought perhaps to be rendered as well. Although lawyers have always had to be concerned about striking the proper balance between advice and advocacy, there are special pressures today because of the way some of the best and brightest attorneys practice their profession. In business, lawyers of ten take over as operating officers.
Boards of directors are flush with them, and often an attorney will take not a fee but a percentage of the deal he is drawing up.
In such situations, the lawyer's supposedly detached view has in fact be come much the same as that of any prof it-anxious corporate manager. Since lawyers also find themselves with similarly heavy commitments in politics — and since, in addition, they are the principal intermediaries between business and government — the maintenance of an above-the-action detachment is both difficult and not always personally satisfying. To be the commander or a chief deputy has a natural appeal.
Yet a certain impartiality is essential to the practice of law. If the man who tries to be his own lawyer has a fool for a client, then the lawyer who be comes his own client is not much better off. Some years ago Law Professor Monroe Freedman raised a storm by suggesting that a criminal-defense lawyer owed such complete allegiance to his client that he should balk at practically nothing, including even in some cases perjury. But this is closer to the no-holds-barred philosophy of war than to that of law. Professor Philip Kurland of the University of Chicago Law School has written about the Watergate mess: "Whatever one might properly expect of professional spies or advertising men, surely the lawyers owed a duty to the law whose keepers they are."
They certainly did, but the kept make poor keepers.
The law is supposed to be the repository of a society's ethics and morals. It is of course also slavishly technical, extravagantly complex and simultaneously too precise and not precise enough. But its very imperfection is why it has need of lawyers constant ly to nurture its growth and to correct its sometimes unjust ways. Legal groups may need to devise new guidelines that somehow strike a better balance between the roles of counselor and advocate. But the chief difficulty is find ing and restoring to the profession its sense of duty to the continuing experiment of law. Some slight satisfaction can be salvaged from the current debacle if it helps restore to lawyers a renewed sensitivity to that most necessary Obligation. *José M. Ferrer III
*Their names: William O. Bittman, Charles Colson, John Dean. John Ehrlichman, Herbert Kalmbach, Robert Mardian, John Mitchell, Paul O'Brien. Kenneth Wells Parkinson, Gordon Strachan. Dean left out one law-breaking lawyer:
G. Gordon Liddy. who pleaded guilty to the Watergate breakin. Other lawyers not on Dean's list but involved in different ways in Watergate:
L. Patrick Gray. Egil Krogh. Henry Petersen. Herbert Porter, Donald Segretti and. of course. Richard M. Nixon.