Contextualising Lawyer Overcharging

The law recognises various avenues directed to controlling costs as between lawyer and client, which assume significance in the modern competitive legal market. Competition has prompted many lawyers to pursue an increasingly mercantile approach to legal practice, directed at profit maximisation. The latter reveals a tension not just with avenues to control costs but with traditional notions of professionalism. What lies at the pivot in this tension, and its ethical dimension, is the prospect of professional discipline for overcharging. Contextualised by the foregoing backdrop, this article investigates this ethical dimension, in a quest to flesh out its parameters.