Law Commons^™

Who Is The Client? Rethinking Professional Responsibility For Benefit Corporations, Joseph R. Pileri

Catholic University Law Review

A growing social enterprise movement has led companies to increasingly opt into the benefit corporation form, and those companies are hiring lawyers. Benefit corporations challenge the notion that corporate law’s primary focus is on furthering shareholder interests. While many have written about the benefit corporation with respect to corporate fiduciary law, this Article is the first to explore the form’s ethical implications for lawyers. Ethical obligations necessarily reflect substantive law governing client organizations; changes to the corporate form presented by benefit corporation legislation should reverberate in legal ethics. The legal profession, however, has not addressed how to lawyer to a …