The cover-up is the killer.
That sounds obvious until you look at how these cases actually unfold. A deadline is overlooked. A hearing is missed. A letter isn’t sent. A difficult file quietly gets put to the bottom of the pile and forgotten.
At that point, what you have is a problem. Problems, in professional life, are supposed to be solvable: you fix them, apologise, and move on. But something else happens in a some cases. The problem gets worse, much worse. It stops being an error and becomes a cautionary tale. A misleading update to a client. A quick attendance note that records a conversation that didn’t actually happen. An email altered so the timeline looks better. A signature witnessed on paper that wasn’t witnessed in reality.
When that line is crossed, even if the action looks pretty benign all things considered, professional regulators treat it as dishonesty. And dishonesty, unless there are exceptional circumstances, is usually terminal.
This is where the “bad apples” explanation usually comes in. These people were always going to do the wrong thing, because the wrong thing is just what bad apples do. I’m not sure that explanation is even close to being correct.
If we really want to prevent these outcomes, we have to ask a more uncomfortable question: why do people who are otherwise decent, diligent, and conscientious, who have trained for years to be a part of this profession, do something so obviously self-destructive? Why don’t they just hold their hands up?
I’m no psychologist, but there must be something more fundamental going on.
Shame is a powerful emotion. In our profession, competence is part of the identity. Being a “safe pair of hands” is treated as a virtue. A serious mistake threatens our self image. It says: perhaps you are not who you thought you were. Perhaps you are not who everyone else thinks you are.
Psychologists call this an identity threat. And under identity threat, people do strange things. Not always immoral things. But often things that involve self-protection. The brain is trying, desperately, to make the uncomfortable feeling go away.
This is how the first lie tends to enter the room: with a perfectly respectable justification. “I’m not lying, I’m buying time.” “I’ll fix it and then tell them.” “There’s no point alarming the client until I know the position.” In that moment, concealment can actually feel like professionalism. Telling the truth can feel like recklessness. We’ve all been there.
There’s another mechanism at work too: the slippery slope doesn’t feel slippery at the top. The first lie is pretty small. A sentence in an email that implies progress when there hasn’t been any. A file note written after the fact that’s a little more polished than your memory. A backfilled record because “I did do the work, just not when it says.” The problem is that each tiny step changes what the next step feels like. Once you have a small deception to protect, the incentive structure shifts. You’re now defending not just the original mistake, but the attempt to conceal it.
And so the behaviour escalates.
There is a phenomenon sometimes described as ethical fading. Under pressure, the moral dimension of a decision disappears. The choice isn’t experienced as “do I act honestly or dishonestly?” but as “how do I get through today?” The file becomes less a record of reality and more an instrument for keeping the world at bay. You can almost feel the psychology in some of the disciplinary cases: the attendance note isn’t written to deceive in a grand, strategic way, it’s written to make the anxiety stop.
Add to this the nature of our profession. Could it make the slippery slope the easier path to take? Lawyers are certainly not uniquely flawed, but the environment in which we work is very good at turning small errors into existential dread.
We all know that law is high-stakes and deadline-driven. It runs on judgement and reputation. It is a status profession with a perfectionist culture. Many people in the early years are operating on a toxic mix of heavy caseloads, insufficient supervision, client expectations of instantaneous responsiveness, billing pressure, and the nagging suspicion that everyone else is better than you are and will progress faster. If you already have a perfectionist streak, it is an excellent environment to turn that trait into a liability.
Then there’s the client file. On paper, it should be just an objective record. In practice, it is also a performance because it is subjected to scrutiny by supervisors and possibly third parties. The file should demonstrate the lawyer’s competence and diligence. It is what you point to when challenged: look, this is what I did, this is what I thought, this is why I acted. However, when you start falling behind, the file becomes an accusation. It broadcasts your failures. It becomes a stick to beat you with.
Which brings me to a distant memory from early in my career. A young paralegal I knew who kept a “cabinet of chaos” (it was actually a pedestal drawer). It contained a cluster of files he didn’t open because opening them made his stomach drop. They were the matters where something had gone wrong. He had missed court directions, or he couldn’t get instructions to settle from his client and the matter was hurtling to trial. His coping strategy was simply avoidance. Not because he didn’t care, perhaps because he cared too much. You can probably guess the eventual outcome. Nobody should condone the path he chose, but perhaps we can have some empathy and try to understand why he chose it.
There must come a point where “holding your hands up” doesn’t feel like the sensible option. It’s more like detonating your life.
I worry that this is where the legal profession’s moral messaging can accidentally backfire. We tell people, correctly, that dishonesty is catastrophic. But we also put so many safeguards in place to avoid technical, legal and client service errors (aka insurance, reputation and commercial risk) that some people hear something else: that mistakes are catastrophic too. When in reality we all know that most mistakes can be salvaged. And even if they can’t, that’s why we have insurance. But if your mind has already decided that a catastrophe is imminent, it would be easy to start making decisions designed to avoid it at any cost. You can see the logic: if I admit this, I’m finished; if I can just tidy it up, I can survive.
The tragedy is that the attempt to survive creates the very outcome they fear.
So are these “bad apples”? Sometimes, yes. But often, it looks more like good people, often at the start of their career, under strain, doing something stupid and then making it much worse.
The practical implication is almost embarrassingly simple. Build cultures where early confession and “sticking your hand up” is normalised. Make it psychologically safe to say “I’ve messed up” before human emotions and self-preservation take over.
I would urge the regulator to encourage firms to take this approach, as a “protecting trust and confidence in the profession” measure.
In primary schools, they teach children to celebrate their “Marvellous Mistakes” because every mistake is also a learning opportunity. Perhaps there’s something we should take from that.
