You are absolutely right to say Richard, that lawyers are vulnerable to social, psychological and economic as well as intellectual factors when faced with a client who needs something fixed. And therein lies the flaw in the so called 'independent review'. For a review to be 'independent' it must be commissioned by a someone removed from the matters being reviewed - in this case no one at the PO. Rather the Minister or an independent director of the Board. And they should have appointed someone to conduct the review with no previous knowledge or involvement with the entity being reviewed so that none of the extraneous factors, listed above, contaminate the review and the resulting report. The PO matter was a travesty at multiple levels, starting with the false prosecutions in the first place then compounded as those involved (inside and outside the PO) tried to 'mitigate their mistakes.
You are absolutely right to say Richard, that lawyers are vulnerable to social, psychological and economic as well as intellectual factors when faced with a client who needs something fixed. And therein lies the flaw in the so called 'independent review'. For a review to be 'independent' it must be commissioned by a someone removed from the matters being reviewed - in this case no one at the PO. Rather the Minister or an independent director of the Board. And they should have appointed someone to conduct the review with no previous knowledge or involvement with the entity being reviewed so that none of the extraneous factors, listed above, contaminate the review and the resulting report. The PO matter was a travesty at multiple levels, starting with the false prosecutions in the first place then compounded as those involved (inside and outside the PO) tried to 'mitigate their mistakes.