We owe our first duty to the law and to the stability of society and our second to the courts. Only then can we consider our clients and others. But some lawyers put their clients first (out of concern for their fees), and the rule of law suffers. Key issues include hiding documents, defending apparently ‘guilty’ people and evading tax. Lawyers can ignore their own character development and try to draw distinctions between active and passivedeceit, especially in relation to taxation. We analyse several unethical scenarios, for example, lawyers who encourage some clients to evade tax by characterising it as avoidance and ‘arguably legal’. General morality – that is, consequentialism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics and Confucian teaching – and the three sets of conduct rules that apply in the PRC, Hong Kong SAR and Taiwan, suggest that good tax lawyers’ efforts to assist their clients to pay less tax within the law will be evident from the transparency of their advice and their accountability in their keeping of proper records. These virtues operate in the context of a wider loyalty to clients: to keep them out of the hands of state authorities investigating taxation infringements.

‘Negligence’ is frightening to think about, but accepting the possibility of making mistakes as lawyers does not mean we ought to give up on a desire to perform to the best of our ability, and at the peak of our moral consciousness. This chapter applies morality to our technical competence. In the hothouse atmosphere of competitive law firms, the underlying conflict between commercialism and professionalism leads to moral as well as financial risk. Only true professionalism – which emphasizes the dual virtues of integrity and competence – will sustainably support your future. Too much concentration on the business of law and profit can and does lead to the temptation to ‘borrow’ clients’ money and to carelessness. There are extensive conduct and accounting rules that focus on accounting honestly for clients’ money, especially for lawyers who practise across international borders, and we should back that up by arranging professional indemnity (malpractice) insurance against any negligence. In addition, risk management, continuing legal education and specialist accreditation courses are all available through the internet to support you, even if not available through a bar association

Technical challenges for lawyers impact on our ethics. Some predict that singularity technologies will progressively merge human and machine intelligences. These may become evident in knowledge processing and therefore affect litigation, with potential for such merged intelligences to minimize moral accountability. Perhaps machine intelligences will progressively calculate which actions are ‘better’ in rigid consequentialist terms, ignoring competing moral frameworks described in this book, and government authority will be challenged. Speculation, of course, but there is unlikely to be a lessening in the need for moral leadership from law school deans, bar association presidents and leading practitioners, as Greater China strives for overall sustainability. Arguably, with our lawyers’ sensitivity to virtue and Confucian teaching we might conclude that narrow role morality is no longer enough. Our final social utility (and the reason for any social and economic privileges we retain as lawyers) may lie in our willingness to help whole communities access practical justice: that is, genuine equality of access to health, food, housing and education.

Client confidentiality expresses the duty of loyalty to our clients, but our secrets are shrinking. Social media, hacking and surveillance are increasingly modern realities. Globally, concern about leaky ‘cloud’ storage, terrorism, corruption, organised crime and money laundering, as well as economic and trading challenges to state and public security, are reportable and create an environment in which lawyers cannot guarantee clients’ privacy. Nevertheless, professional secrecy remains important for lawyers to observe, because clients will not trust us if they think their affairs will be disclosed. We tabulate the confidentiality conduct rules across Greater China and analyze several scenarios according to the four frameworks of general morality. Deciding to keep a secret for good reasons can be a moral act that increases the stability of society. In the mainstream of cases where there are no state secrecy issues, lawyers need to re-legitimize support for client confidentiality because keeping secrets is still important to our communities, so that filial and personal relationships are respected and the common privacy we all need is retained.

Legal ethics challenges us to do the right thing when no one is looking. Beware the lawyer who tells you that something is ‘arguably legal’. Clinical legal education in your law school helps with the answer, because it places you in contact with real clients and teaches how to be a moral lawyer. But do we choose the right thing according to law only, or law and something else? Here, we use a detailed table to examine how Chinese relational ethics are strengthened by comparisons with Western duty-based and virtue ethics frameworks, in contexts including: understanding duty versus (v) knowing your values; education through law or through character development?; asking what should I do v who should I be, v to whom do I owe respect and obedience?; action v character v harmony; rightness v excellence v social cohesion; absolute duties v judgment in choosing virtues v the Confucian balance between all; general principles v particular circumstances v loyalty in pursuit of harmony; reason v emotion v respect in relationships; rule logic v caring perspectives v appropriate role relationships; and the contrasts between universal values, cultural relativity and the political community.

We should act for only one client at a time, to avoid a conflict of interest (or a conflict of loyalty). So what happens when your law firm as a whole has two commercial clients trying to negotiate a merger and one lawyer in one team ‒ yourself ‒ suddenly learns something damaging about the other client that could derail the merger? Traditional role morality, virtue ethics and Confucian teaching require us to avoid situations where interests conflict. Loyalty is not contentious for most of us, except when we are setting our fees. However, the professional conduct rules that apply to current (concurrent) client conflicts and current–former (successive) client conflicts are some of the most complex in Greater China. Utilising scenarios around Big Pharma patents’ disputes, competing airlines and competing steelmakers, our diagrams set out the conduct rules of Greater China and suggest solutions according to general morality. Avoid joint representation in commercially competitive areas – regardless of an information barrier – and where a conflict emerges due to a firm merger, cease acting for both parties.