Digital Commons Network^™

Loyalty In Limbo: The Peculiar Case Of Attorneys' Loyalty To Clients., Eli Wald

St. Mary's Law Journal

Attorney loyalty to clients is considered a cornerstone of the attorney-client relationship. Yet, loyalty is underexplored, misunderstood, and the subject of heated discord. Advocates of client-centered loyalty and their opponents both fail to provide a compelling accounting of loyalty to clients and its consequences. Leaving loyalty in limbo is an unacceptable state of affairs. The legal profession bears the continuous burden of accounting for its own practices. Because the Bar cannot assert broad client-centered loyalty as self-explanatory, the burden of disproving loyalty shifts to the critics. Critics of broad loyalty to clients are not helping advance the discourse by advocating …

Business Lawyers As Enterprise Architects, George W. Dent

Faculty Publications

In 1984 Ronald Gilson published Value Creation by Business Lawyers: Legal Skills and Asset Pricing. It began: "What do business lawyers really do? Embarrassingly enough, at a time when lawyers are criticized with increasing frequency as nonproductive actors in the economy, there seems to be no coherent answer." He dismissed lawyers' own answer that "they 'protect' their clients, that they get their clients the 'best' deal." He also rejected the academic literature which offered a laundry list of roles the business lawyer plays: "a counselor, planner, drafter, negotiator, investigator, lobbyist, scapegoat, champion, and, most strikingly, even as a friend." Dissecting …

Preserving Attorney-Client Privilege In The Age Of Electronic Discovery, Anthony Francis Bruno

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Lawyering In The Academy: The Intersection Of Academic Freedom And Professional Responsibility, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

The legal academy has given little thought to how practicing law within law schools affects professional responsibilities and is different from representing clients in a traditional law firm or how notions of academic freedom affect lawyering in law schools. Yet repeated attempts to interfere with law clinic representation starkly illustrate how lawyering in the academy might be different, under notions of professional responsibility and academic freedom, from other lawyering or typical law teaching.

Scholarship on interference in clinical programs has focused primarily on the impropriety of interference on the institutional autonomy of law schools by those outside the university, such …

Public Interest, Professional Bargains: Ethical Conflicts Between Lawyers And Professional Engineers, Elizabeth J. Hubertz

Scholarship@WashULaw

Environmental experts come from many fields, including biology, geosciences, ecology, chemistry, engineering, social science, and economics. Each discipline has its own set of norms, practices, ethics, guidelines, and procedures, which differ from those of the legal profession. Wherever the disciplines intersect, there is a potential for disagreement. This Article examines one such set of potential clashes — the conflict between a lawyer‘s duties of loyalty and confidentiality, and the engineer‘s paramount duty to the public health, safety, and welfare.

Lawyers Without Borders, Catherine A. Rogers

Faculty Scholarship

Professional regulation of attorneys is still attempting to catch up with the burgeoning international legal profession, which until recently has been wholly unregulated. The primary effort has been through revisions to Model Rule 8.5 to extend the reach of the Rule to international cases and professional activities in foreign countries. Because Rule 8.5 was drafted for domestic multi-jurisdiction practice, however, it is based on assumptions about territoriality and the historical relationship between the jurisdiction of tribunals and the licensing of attorneys that are simply inapposite in international settings. As a result, applying Rule 8.5 to international tribunals and international advocacy …

Advocacy In The Court Of Public Opinion, Installment One: Broadening The Role Of Corporate Attorneys, Michele Destefano Beardslee

Articles

No abstract provided.

Legal Ethics, Patrick Emery Longan

Mercer Law Review

Georgia's appellate courts made significant decisions during the survey year in matters of attorney discipline, malpractice, and ineffective assistance of counsel. They also issued opinions worth noting in cases concerning attorney and judicial disqualification and several miscellaneous matters.

Professional Responsibility, James M. Mccauley

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Race, Identity, And Professional Responsibility: Why Legal Services Organizations Need African American Staff Attorneys, Shani M. King

UF Law Faculty Publications

Given the fundamental importance of the attorney-client relationship in securing favorable outcomes for clients, legal services organizations that serve large populations of African Americans should employ African American staff attorneys because: (1) African American lawyers and clients share a group identity that makes it more likely that a black attorney will be able to gain a black client's trust; (2) black attorneys communicate more effectively with black clients; and (3) the perception of a judicial system that is unfair and racist is likely to encourage black clients to trust black lawyers more than white lawyers, who are more likely to …

Ethical Duties To Prospective Clients Who Send Unsolicited Emails, Nicole Lindquist

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts

Recent Iowa and Massachusetts ethics opinions declared that an attorney may owe ethical obligations to prospective clients who send the attorney just a single email regarding legal assistance. These ethics opinions are part of a trend whereby jurisdictions are extending the duty of confidentiality to prospective clients who send unsolicited emails to attorneys, when those persons reasonably believe that the conveyed information will be held in confidence. These opinions highlight the importance for all attorneys to disclaim duties of confidentiality and representation, particularly when advertising online. This article discusses ethical opinions regarding prospective clients who send unsolicited emails and concludes …

Foreword, Laurel S. Terry

Penn State International Law Review (1982 - 2011)

No abstract provided.

Preserving The Corporate Attorney-Client Privilege: Here And Abroad, Robert J. Anello

Penn State International Law Review (1982 - 2011)

No abstract provided.

The Paradox Of Professionalism: Global Law Practice Means Business, Christopher J. Whelan

Penn State International Law Review (1982 - 2011)

No abstract provided.

Ethical Considerations Relating To Outsourcing Of Legal Services By Law Firms To Foreign Service Providers: Perspectives From The United States, James I. Ham

Penn State International Law Review (1982 - 2011)

No abstract provided.

Lawyers, Symbols, And Money: Outside Investment In Law Firms, Milton C. Regan Jr.

Penn State International Law Review (1982 - 2011)

No abstract provided.

Civil Liability For Aiding And Abetting: Should Lawyers Be "Privileged" To Assist Their Clients' Wrongdoing?, Eugene J. Schiltz

Pace Law Review

No abstract provided.

Licensing Lawyers In The Modern Economy, Trippe S. Fried

Campbell Law Review

This article explores a key question for the future of the legal profession: does a paradigm in which each individual state has exclusive control over the practice of law within its borders work in the marketplace of Friedman's "flat world"? Or in today's global economy does state micromanagement of the legal profession so inure to the detriment of lawyers and clients that some form of national licensing is necessary?

Ordeal By Innocence: Why There Should Be A Wrongful Incarceration/Execution Exception To Attorney-Client Confidentiality, Colin Miller

NULR Online

No abstract provided.

Sanctioning The Ambulance Chaser, Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Lawyers As Quasi-Public Actors, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This paper was written for a panel on access to justice at the 100th anniversary conference of the Law Society of Alberta, Canada. In it I argue that the debate over access to justice, which in the United States generally means pro bono representation provided by individual lawyers, cannot be divorced from broader theoretical debates about the lawyer's role. My claim is that lawyers are quasi-public actors, in the sense that they have some responsibility to aim directly at justice in their representation of clients, and cannot rely only on indirect strategies to ensure that justice is served. The argument …

Professional Responsibility In Crisis, Douglas L. Colbert

Faculty Scholarship

Some rare, often catastrophic, events present in stark terms a need for careful reflection over the role of attorneys in our society and their ethical duties as members of the legal profession. The devastation caused by both Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 certainly falls within this category. Professor Colbert uses these events as a backdrop to examine the legal profession’s ethical obligation when crisis compromises the most basic elements of our system of justice. Acknowledging that numerous members of the bar and thousands of volunteer law students courageously stepped forward in those challenging …

The Future Regulation Of The Legal Profession: The Impact Of Treating The Legal Profession As Service Providers, Laurel Terry

Faculty Scholarly Works

In the past fifty years, one has heard debates about whether law is a business, a profession, or both, what these terms mean and whether it matters. Regardless of what one thinks about these debates, there is a new paradigm that must be added to the mix, which is the paradigm of lawyers as "service providers." In the "service providers" paradigm, the legal profession is not viewed as a separate, unique profession entitled to its own individual regulations, but is included in a broader group of "service providers," all of whom can be regulated together. This new paradigm represents a …

The Core Values Of The Legal Profession For Lawyers Today And Tomorrow, Jonathan Goldsmith

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

This Article began life as a speech I gave on the fifth anniversary of the Flemish Bar in Belgium (Orde Van Flaamse Balies) on 24 May 2007. It addresses the changes which are taking place in Europe and elsewhere in the world in relation to the regulation of lawyers, particularly insofar as the core values of the legal profession are concerned.

International Legal Practice Involving England And New York Following Adoption Of The United Kingdom Legal Services Act Of 2007, Sydney M. Iii Cone

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

This article deals with the regulation of legal services in England and New York in the context of, first, multidisciplinary practice ("MDP") and, second, permitted investment in legal practice. The article summarizes both the background of and potential differences between the regulations in those two jurisdictions, and comments on the possible reconciliation of those differences. Because, chronologically, New York was the first of the two jurisdictions under consideration to adopt rules on MDP, the New York rules will be considered first, and the more recent statute, known as the United Kingdom Legal Services Act 2007 (hereinafter "U.K. Act"), will then …

Global Law Firms: Globalization And Organizational Spaces Of Cross-Border Legal Work, James R. Faulconbridge, Jonathan V. Beaverstock, Daniel Muzio, Peter J. Taylor

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

The aim of this paper is not, however, to generically chart the rise of the global law firm; others have already done this. Instead, our interest lies in better understanding how existing geographies of globalization of law and lawyers, alongside the new geographies of professional partnership and legal work, have created opportunities and challenges for global law firms. More specifically, we seek to unravel the complexities of: (a) the factors driving the presence and absence of global law firms in different cities; and (b) the way that law firms have been reconfigured to operate as spatially distributed organizations present in …

The Legal World Is Flat: Globalization And Its Effect On Lawyers Practicing In Non-Global Law Firms, Laurel S. Terry

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

While lawyers in these large global law firms usually are aware of why globalization is relevant to them, other U.S. lawyers may not think that the globalization phenomenon affects them. A comment frequently heard is "Law is local so I don't have to worry about globalization affecting me or my practice." The goal of this article is to look at Friedman's work through the lens of legal services and to answer several questions, including: • Whether Friedman's analysis is relevant to what has happened in the field of legal services; • Whether a U.S. lawyer who doesn't practice in a …

Globalization And The Business Of Law: Lessons For Legal Education, Carole Silver, David Van Zandt, Nicole De Bruin

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Cross-border law practice is growing to serve the increasingly global business of its clients, and U.S. and U.K. firms have been leaders in this global expansion of law practice. Expansion takes several forms, including the physical--with law firms opening offices in faraway locations to serve existing and new clients1--as well as the virtual--based on technology that supports the economics of cross-border activity by enabling practice apart from physical presence. Whether working for global or local organizations, lawyers today are increasingly faced with the prospect of working with colleagues and competitors who are diverse in terms of nationality, education and training, …

Lawyers, Law Firms, And The Stabilization Of Transnational Business, John Flood, Fabian Sosa

Northwestern Journal of International Law & Business

Cross-border business transactions are complex. But in this globalized age, as commentators such as Ohmae have argued, business ought to be conducted simply despite national boundaries. Yet there are features of business that run counter to globalization and maintain a resolutely local character. A crucial aspect of this is the nature of law. No transaction can be carried out without a normative structure to provide a framework for the actors to operate within. Obligations, rights, warranties, covenants, and so on have to be specified and allocated. Even economists agree that the rule of law is essential for the conduct of …

Disaster Planning: What We Have (And Haven't) Learned, Gary A. Munneke

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Basic disaster planning is not only cost-effective but relatively easy to integrate with other planning activities. By looking at the experiences of lawyers and law firms that have survived disasters in recent years, it is possible to gain insights that will help us overcome such adversity. Transactional business lawyers, whose clients are frequently the victims of the same forces that harm lawyers, have a special obligation to serve these clients in times of crisis in order to restore these businesses to functionality and commerce to the community at large.