Slaw.ca Legal Ethics Column, January 31, 2019.
Found online at: http://www.slaw.ca/2019/01/31/collegial-reputation-and-peer-rankings-an-invisible-hand/
Suppose you have practiced law for many years in the same community. You are shown a list of other lawyers who do the same sort of work as you, in the same area. You probably have an opinion about most of the names on the list. Favourable or unfavourable impressions will have accumulated from your interactions with them on files, your observations of their work, and other colleagues’ comments to you about them.
Of course, they also have opinions about you. Your collegial reputation is the sum of the opinions about you held by others in your community of practice.
Collegial reputations are not necessarily fair or well- deserved. They may reflect prejudice or irrelevant factors, rather than the real qualities of someone’s work. Nevertheless, within professions like law, colleagues are relatively well placed to evaluate the many aspects of value that are invisible to clients. Continue reading