For this assignment, I settled on ‘The Firm’, which is a 1993 movie based on the novel that is called ‘The Firm’ which was written by John Grisham and published in 1991. The movie revolves around a Mitch McDeere, who is a young man just about to graduate from Harvard Law School.
Mitch is approached by Lambert, Bendini, and Locke on a behalf of ‘The Firm’ (the name of the organization that hires Mitch) who offers to make him an associate at the company. The offer is too good to turn down and so Mitch accepts the offer and moves with his wife, Memphis, where the company is located. Here, he finds Avery who takes him under his wings and mentors him at The Firm.
At first, Mitch is oblivious to The Firm’s activities, neither is he suspicious that the firm can be conducting illegal operations despite all the expensive and unnecessary gifts that he is offered by the firm. But soon, however, things change when he is contacted by the FBI about the murders of two associates of The Firm. He is informed by the FBI investigators that they have a reason to suspect that there exists a link between the mob and the firm, and that any associate who has ever contemplated leaving the firm in the past has ended up dead.
This information puts him in an awkward position where he has the option of working with the FBI and risk being discovered by the firm, which could cost him his law license due to attorney-client confidentiality, or alternatively, he can stay with the firm and end up in jail when the FBI cracks the firm’s illegal activities. Either way, his life is in danger.
In the end, however, Mitch discovers proof that all The Firm’s associates are guilty of overbilling and this enables him to cooperate with the FBI without breaking any laws, thereby allowing him to keep both his law license and his life.
The movie highlights a number of ethical principles in professional codes of ethics. The first and most obvious one in this case is confidentiality. Stake holders in law and medical practice (just to name a couple of concerned professions) are charged with the responsibility of taking to the grave any information given to them in confidentiality by their clients in the course of performing their duty/ work.
In the movie, this phenomenon has been developed by Mitch, who is reluctant to work with the FBI in exposing The Firm’s illegal activities because he thinks that he is bound by attorney-client confidentiality. Therefore, by revealing The Firm’s illegal activities to the FBI investigators, Mitch would have acted against the law and would consequently have lost his law license. Additionally, he would have betrayed his colleagues/ partners, which bring us to another professional code of ethics, loyalty.
In law practice (as portrayed by the movie), when an associate deals with a client, he/she is considered to be acting on a behalf of his firm. This means that all associates will be responsible for the outcome of such interactions, whether pleasant or otherwise.
In the movie, Mitch faces the possibility of going to prison if the FBI uncovers the firm’s illegal activities, even though he was not personally involved in such dealings. This also brings out the aspect of honesty as a professional code of ethics. Mitch in the movie is faced with the dilemma of snitching on his firm, or keeping mum which would be a direct violation of his personal code of ethics (Ebert, 1993).
Justice is another element of professional codes of ethics that has been derived from the movie. The judiciary, acting under the direction of the law, is charged with the responsibility of providing justice to all.
This implies that by virtue of being a lawyer, Mitch was expected to ensure that justice prevailed regardless of his affiliation to the parties involved; therefore covering up for his colleague’s misdeeds would be going against the code of ethics of his profession. This, I believe, is a contributing factor as to why he uncovered his partners’ overpricing activities in order to find a way to indirectly link his associates to their illegal activities without exposing himself in the process.
The movie has managed to capture the aforementioned professional codes of ethics associated with the law practice, i.e. loyalty, honesty, confidentiality, and justice, in way that they can easily be identified.
It has also made it easy for the audience to relate the emotions and decisions that the main character (Mitch) is going through and has to make (respectively), with their own lives. It has outlined the various hurdles that lawyers have to maneuver in the course of their duty, and also some of the threats to their personal moral codes of conduct that these same professionals face.
Despite the fact that the movie is based on the life of a lawyer, the ethical issues captured in it cut across all professions and individuals of proper moral standing. It, for example, shows how hostile the business environment can be, and sometimes one has to “eat or be eaten” by others. This forces Mitch to reveal his associates misdealing in a bid to rescue him from the arm of the law.
In my opinion, the writers of this movie have done an effective job of displaying the various challenges that most professionals encounter in the line of duty, and also the ingenious ways in which people who find themselves in such positions can adopt so as to wriggle themselves out of these situations, without compromising on neither their professional nor their personal ethics.
They have also tackled some of the stereotypes/generalizations that people make on a daily basis, most of the time without even giving a thought as to how true these assumptions are.
Take for example, the FBI investigators who threatened Mitch with a jail sentence should he have failed to expose his associates’ illegal activities with the mob. The investigators failed to take into account the possibility that Mitch could be an innocent citizen who happened to be walking through a crime scene. They end up charging him as an accomplice.
The message that I have taken from this movie in relation to the business world and professional ethics is that “when the deal is too sweet, think twice”. The various expensive gifts that Mitch was being given should have made him question the intentions of the giver. I have also learnt to be weary of the people with whom I associate because as is written in the holy Bible, “show me your friends, and I will tell you your character”.
Reference
Ebert, R. (1993). The Firm Review. Web.