The corporate legal profession’s role in global corruption: obligations and opportunities for contributing to collective action

Abstract Key corruption issues, like lack of transparency in beneficial ownership and money laundering, are inherently transnational. They are facilitated by professional services, like corporate lawyers, who work with various standards, regulations, and global financial flows that can move the proceeds of crime across the world. This paper uses reflective equilibrium to analyze the tensions between the philosophical principles of complicity and collective responsibility and the principles found in the professional role of lawyers in society to reflect on the corporate legal profession’s role in enabling corruption. Furthermore, this paper explores how these tensions can be addressed and how lawyers can be situated in anti-corruption collective action theory and practical collective action initiatives. For example, the legal profession has a collective obligation to maintain and self-patrol the profession’s ethics, primarily through their regulating authorities, and it should be considered to what extent these authorities are promoting anti-corruption standards or reprimanding lawyers who are complicit in corrupt acts. There is also an opportunity for corporate lawyers to use their role in society to develop more collective action initiatives to address issues of transnational corruption, which may include enforcing a higher collective standard in providing advice or advocating for legislators to fix regulations and promote legislation that addresses corrupt practices.