Law Commons^™

Who Watches The Watchmen? Using The Law Governing Lawyers To Identify The Applicant Duty Gap And Hold Bar Examiner Gatekeepers Accountable, Ashley M. London

Law Faculty Publications

The legal profession holds lawyers to high standards in their personal and professional lives and expects aspiring members to follow the ethical rules with scrupulous precision and candor. Yet the profession, and those monitoring admission to the profession, afford no protections or recourse to this class of young professionals during that critical period between graduation and successful bar passage.

Without reform, this previously unacknowledged duty gap will continue to demoralize and potentially harm future lawyers and reflect negatively on the profession as a whole. Supervising bodies, discussed within, treat applicants as if they have already committed an ethical breach. Indeed, …

How To Raise Disagreements With Senior Attorneys, Richard L. Heppner Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

As a new attorney, you may receive assignments from your supervising attorney like:

• find a case that stands for this legal argument,

• draft the section of the brief arguing that the court has no jurisdiction, or

• write a client memo explaining why this asset purchase is a good idea.

Sometimes you will discover that the initial assignment isn’t necessarily the best approach. This paper discusses how to engage your supervising attorney in a such situations.

Something Wicked This Way Thumbs: Personal Contact Concerns Of Text-Based Attorney Marketing, Ashley M. London

Law Faculty Publications

When the American Bar Association (ABA) announced its latest revisions to Model Rules 7.1–7.5, governing attorney advertising, solicitation, and information about legal services in general, the organization may have unintentionally created a way for attorneys to hack directly into the brains of potential clients for purposes of pecuniary gain.

Brushing aside decades of precedent, the rule on Solicitation of Clients now allows real-time electronic solicitation, including text messaging and tweets. These developments beg the question of whether or not the ABA committee charged with redefining this rule actually understands the power and pervasiveness of cell phones, or how the use …

Ai Report: Humanity Is Doomed. Send Lawyers, Guns, And Money!, Ashley M. London

Law Faculty Publications

AI systems are powerful technologies being built and implemented by private corporations motivated by profit, not altruism. Change makers, such as attorneys and law students, must therefore be educated on the benefits, detriments, and pitfalls of the rapid spread, and often secret implementation of this technology. The implementation is secret because private corporations place proprietary AI systems inside of black boxes to conceal what is inside. If they did not, the popular myth that AI systems are unbiased machines crunching inherently objective data would be revealed as a falsehood. Algorithms created to run AI systems reflect the inherent human categorization …

Attorney-Client Privilege - Corporations - Work Product Doctrine - Administrative Summonses, Dolores Jacobs Krawec

Duquesne Law Review

The Supreme Court of the United States, in a unanimous decision, has held that the control group test for determining the applicability of the attorney-client privilege in the corporate context is overly restrictive and that any future application of the privilege must be on a case by case basis. The Court also held that the work product doctrine is applicable to administrative summonses.

Upjohn Co. v. United States, 449 U.S. 383 (1981).

Judicial Control Over The Bar Versus Legislative Regulation Of Governmental Ethics: The Pennsylvania Approach And A Proposed Alternative, Stephen J. Shapiro

Duquesne Law Review

Pennsylvania courts, led by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, recently have declared two sections of the Pennsylvania Ethics Act unconstitutional as applied to judges and attorneys. Citing the exclusive power of the supreme court to regulate the practice of law in Pennsylvania, the courts have struck down the Act's postemployment restriction and financial disclosure requirement. The author critically examines the Pennsylvania decisions in this area and concludes that the courts' reasoning is contrary to settled principles of separation of powers. He suggests an alternative approach for determining the constitutionality of ethics legislation that regulates the conduct of the judiciary and …