In-house lawyers and the price of saying no: ethical agency within cultures of conformity

Studies on in-house lawyers tend to suggest they rarely have to say ‘no’, and do so with no difficulty when they do or, conversely, find it too easy to get comfortable with questionable activity rather than say ‘no’. This paper offers a different, more realistic characterisation of the ‘trouble with no’. A series of sometimes emotionally raw semi-structured interviews explore the difficulties of feeling compelled to and then having to make a stand. Through examining the why and how of making a stand against their employers’ preferences, we explore a psychodrama of conflicting roles, ambiguities, professional responsibilities and client-corporate loyalties. Faced with sometimes significant potential and actual impropriety, our participants acted as ethical agents, seeking to ‘hold the line’ against demands of servility. To make such stands, they drew on social capital, support networks and personal resilience in opposition to executive power and poor organisational culture. These assertions of professional independence profoundly penetrated the personal sphere. Whatever the outcome, they were almost always accompanied by significant vulnerability, precarity and tolls on well-being. The study provides critical evidence of the potential difficulties of exercising agency and professional independence for those practising in-house.