Roles for Lawyers in the Transformation

By: The Uncertain Solicitor, 4 July 2024

This article by The Uncertain Solicitor examines the phenomenon of $20 million salaries for top lawyers, critiquing it as a symbol of systemic economic and environmental imbalance. It argues that such high earnings reflect and exacerbate unsustainable practices contributing to climate change and societal inequality.

Topics covered:

  • Economic implications: What high salaries signify about current values
  • Environmental impact: Lawyer salaries linked to ecological imbalance and climate change
  • Systemic critique: The need for transformation over minor adjustments
  • Rationality vs. radicalism: Reevaluating success from a planetary perspective
  • Personal and professional conflict: Challenges of operating within a lucrative system
  • Call to action: Lawyers’ potential role in fostering systemic change
  • Alternative vision: Imagining a more sustainable and equitable future for the legal profession


What is rational and what is radical? The obvious answer within those sub-systems is it is rational to want to make more money and radical to suggest a better alternative may be an approach focused on sufficiency and redistribution. Through the lens of the planetary ecosystem, however, it is rational to do all we can to preserve those optimal conditions for life on earth, dialling down the levels of financial returns and pay awards expected from one small part of the system to help restore the wider system to better balance and health for universal benefit. The radical stance is to continue with practices we know will lead to self-termination.

The Uncertain Solicitor, 4 July 2024

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