The Legal Status of Professional Standards for Lawyers (A Comparative Study)

Financial and ethical scandals in different institutes, including professional institutions, are among the main factors which may lead to economic and social crises, and these scandals would justify the requirement for approving codes of conduct based on the approach of professional self-regulation and considering the features of that profession by people engaging in those vocations. Advocacy is a profession with high emphasis on professionalism and independence of action, and the Iranian government has recently attempted to consider this area more seriously. Now the question is that what kind of professional criteria and standards the legal profession is subject to, and how their legal status is? For that aim, German and American legal professional organizations in Germany and the U.S, along with compiled particular behavioral documents independent from the government, started to approve codes of conduct for lawyers and the inclusion of detailed behavioral assignments in them, and also considered legal sanctions from a long time ago. In a descriptive-analytical study, one can find out those obligations such as confidentiality, refrain from conflict of interests, compliance with the requirements associated with the advertising of legal services, etc. are identified in these countries and are reinforced by disciplinary and, in some cases, criminal legal sanctions that can be considered as a target in the Iranian bar associations and make government interventions void because of lack of a particular pattern to establish the codes of conduct for lawyers in Iran, the dispersion of regulations governing attorneys at various levels, etc.