Post Office scandal already a wake-up call for in-house lawyers

The dust is far from settled on the Post Office scandal but are the lessons already being learned in some quarters?

The ongoing public inquiry has highlighted not only individual mistakes (putting it as neutrally as possible) but endemic issues within the in-house team that created the conditions for the appalling miscarriages of justice.

Based on the testimony – and again, taking this purely at face value – of in-house lawyers working for the Post Office, these individuals felt isolated, ill-trained, poorly supervised and unmotivated.

Their actions will be judged in the fullness of time by the inquiry chair Sir Wyn Williams, but it is clear the scandal has already started making waves in the in-house sector.

Many delegates at the Law Society in-house conference on Monday told me that the Post Office scandal has spurred their chief executives and HR directors to look at their legal teams in a different light and realise they need nurturing and improving.

One senior counsel at a large corporation said they had undergone extensive ethics training from a leading law firm – unheard of 10 or 20 years ago. Another organisation had conducted a root and branch review into lines of communication from the in-house lawyers to the senior management team. Lawyers had been brought into committees set up to deal with issues such as working practices, communication and reporting misconduct to management.

But factors that emerged in the Post Office scandal remain issues that all organisations should be addressing with their in-house team.

Do senior managers understand the duties that their lawyers are under and the code of conduct they have to follow? Do they understand – as Post Office chief Paula Vennells appeared not to – that these must trump considerations of loyalty to the company?

Do lawyers working in-house have an opportunity to raise concerns with management? Are they empowered to speak out, or made to fear the consequences of blowing the whistle?

Are they working in silos, parted from and oblivious to the rest of the business? Are they, for example, kept informed when there is a potential fault with something as serious as an IT system?

Do lawyers working in-house receive the professional development they need? Are they fully cognisant of, for example, disclosure obligations or the rules about how to instruct expert witnesses?

All of these questions should be asked in boardrooms across the country as a matter of urgency.

The fallout from the Post Office scandal will continue for years to come but the opportunity to learn from what happened should be taken immediately. The circumstances of this particular episode – the scale, the position of private prosecutor, the involvement of government as a shareholder – make the Post Office a unique case. But the themes which lie at the heart of the scandal are universal: honesty, transparency, accountability.

Every in-house lawyer and definitely their senior management team should be asking: are we doing enough?