It has been fashionable to speak about the future of lawyers in terms of commoditisation, standardisation and technology (yes, I am speaking about you, Richard Susskind). Those factors will clearly have their impact – even though to date, far from there being fewer lawyers as predicted, there are more and more in all developed jurisdictions. But I want to speak about a different kind of future which is appearing, and which relates not to the practice and form, but to the meaning, of being a lawyer.

Current developments in a number of fields are bumping up against what have long been accepted as lawyers’ core principles, and sometimes the developments seem to be stronger than the principles. I take these principles to be independence, confidentiality and the avoidance of conflicts of interest. I will use three examples of this uneven struggle.

First, there are alternative business structures. Hostile commentators blame them on the UK, although they began in Australia and are now being spread by the economic crisis. In Europe, there are now ABSs in Spain (minority non-lawyer ownership allowed) and Italy (up to one-third non-lawyers), while Portugal is considering them, and Ireland and Greece are reflecting on MDPs. At the same time, the European Commission is considering whether non-lawyer-owned law firms should be allowed to move freely around the EU, and has commissioned a study to provide for an ‘Inventory of legal form and shareholding requirements in the EU services sector and their economic assessment’, focusing (among others) on lawyers and with a view to assessing future action.

The clash with core principles is outlined in various documents prepared by the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE), and boils down to this: non-lawyers are not per se bound by the same duties as lawyers; the difference of duties between lawyers and non-lawyers can lead to conflicts and put lawyers under pressure – for instance, when outside owners require their lawyers to comply with certain tasks which would be contrary to the core principles.

The second driver undermining these principles is technology. Outsourcing is the best known example. Legal process outsourcing raises difficult questions of confidentiality when legal work is undertaken outside the firm, but at least it is a matter of choice. Non-legal outsourcing, on the other hand, principally in the form of cloud computing, raises more problematic issues, since client data are held elsewhere, out of control of the lawyer, possibly not securely kept, and – most importantly – many devices now use cloud computing without the lawyer even being aware of it.

There are further challenges raised by technology. What do we do about virtual law firms and their regulation; or about websites run by citizens which rate law firms and individual lawyers in the same way as hotels are rated on TripAdvisor? And how will lawyers prove their identity across borders in electronic proceedings?

The third – and last – driver on which I want to touch is one that I wrote about last month: the efforts by global bodies – the Financial Action Task Force (part of the OECD), the World Bank and the United Nations, which are pursuing laudable goals against crime, corruption and breaches of human rights respectively – to turn lawyers into mere gatekeepers of confidential information, ignoring our nuanced role in a balanced justice system underpinned by mutual rights and the rule of law.

To summarise, there is a continuing and worsening clash between core principles on the one hand and out-of-control international developments (the economic crisis, technology, globalisation) on the other. What are lawyers without core principles, or with core principles which can be easily set aside?

I gave a speech on this subject recently and it was labelled depressing. For what can lawyers do about it? Well, there is a range of responses, from the fundamentalist (‘Everything must stay the same’) to the hyper-practical (‘We must change with the times or we will be swept away’). I suspect that neither is sound in its purest form, and different challenges require differently calibrated responses between the two.

But we must take charge of who we think we are. We should reflect on this and come to conclusions about what we will defend and in what circumstances. Then we should proactively promote this vision as each challenge arises. The alternative is what is really depressing: to have our core principles eroded by seemingly uncontrollable events and end up – never mind commoditisation and standardisation – not being recognisable as lawyers at all.

Jonathan Goldsmith is secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents about one million European lawyers through its member bars and law societies. He blogs weekly for the Gazette on European affairs