When presented with a new instruction, solicitors should consider whether climate legal risks may be material to their advice. And reasonably competent solicitors should be aware of the impact and relevance of climate change to their practice area and be able to advise clients accordingly.
Solicitors can choose to decline work that conflicts with their values on climate change.
Moreover, in order to obtain professional indemnity insurance in future, law firms may be asked to demonstrate how they are equipping themselves to advise on climate legal risks and to identify when they are not competent to advise.
The above is included in the Law Society’s ‘Guidance on the impact of climate change on solicitors’, issued last week.
The guidance is in two parts. Part A covers how organisations should manage their business in a manner consistent with the transition to net zero. Part B provides guidance on how climate change physical risks and climate legal risks may be relevant to client advice.
Caroline May, chair of the Law Society’s climate change working group, said the group believed the guidance was the first of its kind for the solicitors’ profession anywhere in the world.
Lisa McClory, a solicitor specialising in technology and sustainability and director at Fractal Legal, said: ‘The list of areas where solicitors should advise their clients is quite extensive, and all practitioners will have to take this seriously in order to stay up to date with climate science.
‘It would be helpful to see some formal guidance from regulators on the extent of solicitors' professional duties to advise clients of climate-related risks, and also some further recognition of equally important risks from biodiversity and nature loss.’
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