On a happy introductory note, I can record that lawyers gained a major victory this week at European level. Before submitting himself to a vote in the European Parliament to support his candidacy to be renominated as president of the European Commission (a vote he won), José Manuel Barroso conceded that he would set up a separate Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Civil Liberties. It will be separated from the security and interior affairs portfolio. This is what we have been seeking for some years. Hurray – at last!But I want to write this week about broader ‘rule of law’ issues. The autumn legal conference session is getting under way, and the topic of ‘rule of law’ features a great deal. For instance, the International Bar Association, meeting in Madrid from 4-8 October, is devoting a whole day to it, which they have done for the last few years. The World Justice Project, a spin-off of an idea launched by a former president of the American Bar Association, is taking four whole days in November in Vienna to discuss the same thing. The CCBE president was asked to give a speech about minimum European standards on the rule of law at the German Federal Bar Association’s 50th anniversary just a week ago. It is almost impossible to go anywhere among lawyers these days without the rule of law being discussed.

I believe it has come about because of the excessive focus by governments and competition authorities on freeing markets in the run-up to the financial crisis. This caused the legal profession to cast about for a new self-identity. The more the authorities wanted to apply economic values to the legal profession, the more they considered lawyers to be just like any other service providers – so, the more lawyers (who did not want to be thought of as just any other service providers) were forced to think what factors made them different from other market forces. Eventually, we arrived at the realisation that our role in regard to the rule of law made us different. Hence, our current excessive concentration on it.

But we have entered different times, and we should develop a new mindset. Although the Legal Services Board seems not yet to have realised it – and even if it had, it would be able to do nothing about it because of the statutory straitjacket in which it is caught – a new regulatory climate is about to be introduced. You can read about it in the run-up to the G20 meeting this week, in the negotiations that took place last week at European level over how to approach the G20 meeting, and in the speeches of Barack Obama. There will be much more emphasis on regulation and on the principles applying to those professions in a position of trust. The idea that the market will solve all our problems is gone.

So, we do not have to rely hysterically and exclusively on the rule of law any more. Calm down, legal profession, there are new times here! Of course, the rule of law will always be an essential part of the role of the lawyer, as it has been for generations. But we should take this opportunity to seek a more balanced approach to our identity, which takes into account other aspects of our function.

Let me suggest a new approach. Is there anyone out there in favour of promoting the idea of trust, for instance, in which we seem to have lost our confidence? We have been undermined by the approach of a government which has repeatedly said that we are not to be trusted to act in our own affairs, that we will just act in our own economic interests. (This has come from the same government which invaded Iraq on false grounds and praised the bankers to the skies the day before the economic roof fell in as a result of those same bankers’ activities.) The legal profession cannot operate without trust, between lawyers themselves, between clients and lawyers, judges and lawyers and through many other relationships. Let us have a conference on the meaning and consequences of that instead.

Jonathan Goldsmith is the Secretary General of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE), which represents over 700,000 European lawyers through its member bars and law societies