Blawg Review #169 — click here to read the review — is available at Whisper, a brand strategy consulting blog.  The review is loosely themed around, no surprise, branding and marketing, with a large variety of blogs and subject matter it is wroth a read.

The Review also links to the July Carnival of Trust at Bossa Blog (click here to read the Carnival), which discussed a Law21 post lamenting the reputation of of lawyers as shifty or untrustworthy, and answering the question, can you trust your lawyer?  As I would, Law21 answers "Yes!":

Lawyers have a choice to make, too. We can reinforce this reputation as skilled and dangerous weapons to be deployed and applied as needed, at a time when trust is becoming intrinsically important to business and consumer relationships; or we can make a real effort to reinvigorate the role of trust in our professional culture, giving it to and expecting it from each other and our clients.

What’s most disheartening about our poor reputation for trust is that lawyers are amazingly trustworthy as individuals, possessing (in my perhaps biased view) more courage and moral fiber than can be found in many other walks of life. And this doesn’t evaporate upon human contact: many lawyers have thriving direct relationships of trust with both colleagues and clients.

The problem is that our professional culture has come to view trust as just too risky — the fear of exploitation and disappointment has had a disproportionate impact on our willingness to trust, and that has damaged the standards to which we hold ourselves and each other. Every lawyer thinks he or she is trustworthy, but for some reason is reluctant to extend that belief to others.