The actual Italian legal panorama is characterised by imposing economic logics that have caused on one hand the unconsidered growth of the number of lawyers and, consequently, the inevitable inadequacy of their professional preparation and ethics, and on the other hand the creation, often followed by their failure, of legal firms and professional associations only based on business logics, aimed at a mere reduction of the costs. Despite of this situation we have chosen to remain faithful to those principles that have always inspired the legal profession.
We firmly believe that the relationship between lawyer and client should be founded on trust.
We also believe in the importance of the researching activity, of the studying of the authorities and of the jurisprudence, in the value of a constant updating and in the respect of professional and ethical rules.
We think that intellectual professions, that even Adam Smith, father of free market economics, excluded from the market, can’t be considered as the other jobs and therefore the Vacirca legal practice has chosen to renounce to the possibility, offered by the law n. 248 of August, 4 2006, of bringing into being informative advertisements1, creating professional associations of lawyers that may include other professional categories and making agreements with the clients for special fees in case of damage, because we think that they are contrary to the principles that inspire our profession and we have therefore chosen to maintain the rigorous line of conduct since now adopted.
Even the European Court of Justice, with the law n. 446/95 of march, 13 2008, has decided that national laws not allowing advertisements for professional activities are not contrary to the rules on competition.
These special agreements arrange for the lawyer, as a retribution for his assistance, a part of the goods concerned by the litigation or the adjustment of his fee according to the value of those goods. These agreements have always been forbidden and the pre- unitary laws considered them as a crime, fearing a dangerous mix of interests and the consequent possible abuse/exploitation of his role by the lawyer in order to preserve his income (this was the opinion of Diderot and D'Alembert in 1870). Moreover, the traditional rules to commensurate the fees with the importance and dignity of the profession have always considered these kind of agreements as contrary to the probity and dignity of the legal profession because of the interests that the lawyer may have in the litigation, and the consequent risk of loosing the needed fairness and serenity.