Toby Landau Keynote, Bocconi University 4th Annual International Arbitration Conference, 21 May 2026

In his keynote at Bocconi's 4th Annual International Arbitration Conference, "Proud, Humbled and Honoured": The Rise of Self-Promotion and the Fall of Ethics, Toby Landau KC traced how the legal profession moved from a near-total prohibition on self-promotion to a culture organized around it, and asked what that shift has cost. Landau began with the historical baseline. For most of the profession's history, lawyer advertising was simply forbidden. The 1908 ABA Canon 27 codified long-standing norms against solicitation and promotional language, and comparable rules applied across common law jurisdictions. The prohibition rested on two rationales: preserving the dignity of law as a vocation rather than a business, and protecting clients both from fee competition, which was thought to lower standards, and from manipulative marketing. Reputation, on this model, was earned and assessed by peers rather than curated by practitioners themselves. That regime held until 1977, when the US Supreme Court held in Bates v. Arizona that lawyer advertising was protected commercial speech. Television advertising followed, along with an incremental relaxation of almost all remaining restrictions. In the United Kingdom, limits on firms and barristers were lifted as well, justified by consumer protection, access to justice, and the recognition that law firms now operate as commercial enterprises. The prohibition was gone. Landau argued that what replaced it was not a modest adjustment but a global machinery for self-promotion built on social media, legal directories, conferences, and paid publications. He examined two components in detail. The first is social media, and LinkedIn in particular, which he described as transforming professional reputation from something earned into something curated. Competence becomes a managed performance. Practitioners publish only their successes, overstate their involvement in matters, and face no verification mechanism. Algorithmic amplification of likes and endorsements invites others to infer quality from popularity, producing a disconnect between visibility and actual competence. The second is legal directories, which he characterized as global commercial ranking systems. Firms nominate their own referees and choose what to highlight. The criteria for rankings and the underlying research methodology are opaque, and what actually makes a good arbitrator or advocate, whether advocacy skill, client profile, or number of appointments, is never clearly defined. Paid profile enhancements mean visibility can be purchased, and existing prominence tends to generate further prominence regardless of underlying quality. The open question, he suggested, is whether directories measure excellence or produce it. Landau then set out the cumulative effect at three levels. At the individual level, tolerance for self-promotional behavior has risen sharply, and the older ideal that the best arbitrator is the reluctant one has given way to open campaigning for appointment. At the systemic level, the capacity to manufacture prominence allows practitioners to sustain careers that genuine peer scrutiny would not support. At the ethical level, the tension is most acute: a profession that depends on collective self-regulation now generates reputation through the very individuals who set the norms governing promotion. His conclusion was that the core principles behind Canon 27, professional dignity, client protection, and honest peer assessment, remain valid; what has changed is the environment in which they operate. Where prominence can be purchased and competence performed rather than demonstrated, the legitimacy of arbitration as a trusted process is eroded from within. He closed with a call for collective action: self-regulation adapted to the new promotional reality, and an honest reckoning with what the profession actually values.