Introduction
The business of law is rapidly changing. The total number of lawyers is fast increasing, and the profession is globalizing through the adoption of resonance regular commercial practice and transnational alliances. Legal privilege is mainly the conception that documents or information acquired during legal advice or litigation must be accorded utmost confidentiality and protected from disclosure during legal proceedings. Business lawyers are responsible for advising their clients on rights, duties, and responsibilities. When a company hires a business attorney, he or she represents the company entity. Business attorneys ensure law compliance by the company while taking on other responsibilities.
Corporate responsibility agenda
Business law ensures companies take advantage of legal structures that separate liability from control and ownership. Modern businesses take advantage of restricted responsibilities for the company’s debts and various financial obligations, while corporate responsibility explores whether a company owes a duty to society or only to its shareholders. The appropriateness and legality of corporate responsibility as a business policy has followed a long and winding road.
There are several key reasons to consider the outcomes of the corporate responsibility agenda for the international legal profession:
- The corporate responsibility legal dimensions already implicate the legal profession.
- The agenda escalates concerns about balancing between business lawyers’ responsibilities to their clients, and their responsibilities to serve the justice interests.
- In-house business lawyers are now involved in the progress of corporate responsibility initiatives and management systems within their company’s businesses.
- Corporate responsibility is effective in ways through which business attorneys are offering advice and meeting their professional duties to their clients.
- The corporate responsibility agenda have directly addressed private for-profit law firms.
Linking corporate responsibility to business law
Integration of corporate responsibility into legal practice needs to incorporate both common and civil law traditions. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a theory whereby businesses integrate environmental and social factors into their company operations and voluntarily interact with the shareholders. The links between corporate social responsibility and business law include:
- The concept of business behavior has remained totally connected to the challenge of ensuring that businesses meet the minimum legal requirements for labor or environmental protection, corporate governance, or fair competition. The voluntary-only definition of CSR is likely to be connected to the focus of encouraging best practices and innovation among businesses.
- Various laws such as misleading advertisements, defamation, competition policy, product liability, and negligence establish voluntary corporate social responsibility.
- The various standard business regulations which lawyers work with increasingly entail voluntary elements such as codes of conduct. Business attorneys must factor the relevance of these soft law elements and voluntary initiatives into their practice.
- Law and litigation have brought new factors to the corporate responsibility agenda in various cases that test the limits of business responsibility. These cases test ways through which legal principles are applied.
- Law and litigation can potentially shape businesses’ reputations as responsible or irresponsible players, hence driving improvements in business practices.
Conclusion
Business lawyers need to involve the relevance of the corporate responsibility agenda and its fundamental principles in their practices.