Law Commons^™

Beyond Cardboard Clients In Legal Ethics, Kate Kruse

Faculty Scholarship

This Article argues that the construction of cardboard clients in legal ethics has disserved legal ethics by obscuring what is arguably a more central problem of legal professionalism: the problem of legal objectification. The problem of legal objectification is the tendency of lawyers to "issue-spot" their clients as they would the facts on a blue-book exam, overemphasizing the clients' legal interests and minimizing or ignoring the other cares, commitments, relationships, reputations and values that constitute the objectives clients bring to legal representation. This Article proposes an alternative ideal of legal professionalism for "three-dimensional clients" based on helping clients articulate and …