Legal Profession Commons^™

Preparing Future Lawyers To Draft Contracts And Communicate With Clients In The Era Of Generative Ai, Kristen Wolff

Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law

No abstract provided.

The Pitch: Teaching Client Impact, Board Governance, And Advocacy, Casey E. Faucon

Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law

No abstract provided.

Mandatory Anti-Bias Cle: A Serious Problem Deserves More Meaningful Response, Rima Sirota

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay addresses the problematic convergence of two recent trends: (1) the expansion of jurisdictions requiring anti-bias training (ABT) as part of mandatory continuing legal education (CLE), and (2) the growing recognition among social scientists that such training, at least as currently practiced, is of limited effectiveness.

Forty-six American states require continuing legal education (CLE), and eleven of these states now require lawyer ABT as one facet of CLE requirements. I have previously criticized the mandatory CLE system because so little evidence supports the conclusion that it results in more competent lawyers. The central question tackled by this essay is …

Moving Beyond Statements And Good Intentions In U.S. Law Schools, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

This Article seeks to answer these questions about how law school leaders might help to cultivate antiracist cultures within their law schools, among their students, and across the legal profession, even in the face of a growing national backlash against antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion.³² Part I first establishes why it is important for law schools to "provide [an] education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism," as the American Bar Association (ABA) requires, and to train future lawyers who have the abilities to combat racism. ³³ In so doing, Part I defines key terms such as …

Four Ways To Update Personnel Handbooks That Need To Become Part Of Your Annual Reviews, Sherley Cruz

Tennessee Law in the News

No abstract provided.

Indigent Defense In Louisville: Conditions For Unionization, Zane R. Phelps

The Cardinal Edge

This paper begins by examining the unionization efforts of the Louisville Metro Public Defender Corporation and seeks to link those conditions with national trends to cultivate a rich understanding of why the attorneys are unionizing and what policy solutions they hope to achieve. After surveying the sources of funding and oversight for indigent defense across varying state systems, it synthesizes a policy recommendation wherein federal intervention (National Labor Relations Board), state and local government budgetary oversight and appropriations powers (Kentucky General Assembly, Louisville Metro Council), and the collective bargaining and unionization process (concerted activity), protected by law, are utilized in …

John Osborn's Enduring Words On Law & Learning, Walter Effross

Popular Media

When I started my first year at Harvard Law School, 17 years after Osborn did, I wasn’t looking for enlightenment. But I expected to be — and was — intimidated by Socratic taskmasters who, like the movie version of Osborn’s Professor Kingsfield (a role for which John Houseman won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award in 1973), were ready with “always another question, another question to follow your answer.”

Lack Of Access To The Law: Saving Black Americans A Seat At The Legal Table Symposium Transcript, Benjamin L. Crump

St. Thomas Law Review

Transcript: Opening Remarks of "Lack of Access to the Law: Saving Black Americans a Seat at the Legal Table" Symposium by Benjamin L. Crump, Esq.

Trauma-Informed (As A Matter Of) Course, Natalie Netzel

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Law students are impacted by trauma and law professors are in a position to help by adopting a trauma-informed approach as a matter of universal precaution. The 2021 Survey of Law Student Well-Being (“SLSWB”) revealed that over twenty percent of responding law students meet criteria that indicate they should be evaluated for post-traumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”). The study also revealed that almost fifty percent of responding students reported an important motivation for attending law school was experiencing a trauma or injustice. Put differently, law schools are full of law students who have experienced trauma, many of whom are actively struggling …

Unsettling Human Rights Clinical Pedagogy And Practice In Settler Colonial Contexts, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, Caroline Bishop Laporte

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

In settler colonial contexts, law and educational institutions operate as structures of oppression, extraction, erasure, disempowerment, and continuing violence against colonized peoples. Consequently, clinical legal advocacy often can reinforce coloniality—the logic that perpetuates structural violence against individuals and groups resisting colonization and struggling for survival as peoples. Critical legal theory, including Third World Approaches to International Law (“TWAIL”), has long exposed colonial laws and practices that entrench discriminatory, racialized power structures and prevent transformative international human rights advocacy. Understanding and responding to these critiques can assist in decolonizing international human rights clinical law teaching and practice but is insufficient in …

Modalities Of Social Change Lawyering, Christine Cimini, Doug Smith

Lewis & Clark Law Review

The last decade has seen the rise of new kinds of grassroots social movements. Movements including Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Sunrise, and #MeToo pushed back against long-standing political, economic, and social crises, including income inequality, racial inequality, police violence, climate change, and the widespread culture of sexual abuse and harassment. As these social change efforts evolve, a growing body of scholarship has begun to theorize the role of lawyers within these new social movements and to identify lawyering characteristics that contribute to sustaining social movements over time. This Article surveys this body of literature and proposes a typology …

The Mystery Of The Leavenworth Oaths, M H. Hoeflich, Stephen M. Sheppard

Faculty Articles

Lawyers have sworn an oath to be admitted to the Bar since the beginnings of the Anglo-American legal profession. The oath serves several extremely important purposes. First, it is the formal act that admits an individual into the Bar and confers upon the oath taker the right to perform the duties of an attorney in the jurisdiction in which the oath is given. Second, the oath admits the new attorney to the broader world of the legal profession and signifies that the new attorney has been judged by the oath giver as worthy of the right to practice law. Third, …

Résumé Review: Breadth And Depth, Patrick Barry

Articles

Nobody is born knowing how to craft an effective résumé. But because the document can play a major role in a young lawyer’s career, I often talk with law students and new attorneys about how they might revise the versions they send out to potential employers. I usually frame my advice by telling them about a concept that can give their resumes a helpful organizing structure: being “T-shaped.”

Deregulation And The Lawyers' Cartel, Nuno Garoupa, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

At one time, the legal profession largely regulated itself. However, based on the economic notion that increased competition would benefit consumers, jurisdictions have deregulated their legal markets by easing rules relating to attorney advertising, fees, and, most recently, nonlawyer ownership of law firms. Yet, despite reformers’ high expectations, legal markets today resemble those of previous decades, and most legal services continue to be delivered by traditional law firms. How to account for this seeming inertia?

We argue that the competition paradigm is theoretically flawed because it fails to fully account for market failures relating to asymmetric information, imperfect information, and …

Lawyers As Caregivers, Paula Schaefer

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

This Article argues that clients—much like patients in a healthcare setting—need their lawyers to be caregivers. The Article opens by developing a definition of caregiving in medicine and law. It then turns to five key components of caregiving in medicine, explaining the substantial research that this care is crucial for patient satisfaction, trust, and healing. Medical educators have drawn on this research to better prepare medical professionals to be excellent caregivers. The Article then explores the evidence that an attorney’s clients have the same needs and suffer similar harm when attorneys fail to meet these needs. Next, the Article turns …

Protecting The Guild Or Protecting The Public? Bar Exams And The Diploma Privilege, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

The bar examination has long loomed over legal education. Although many states formerly admitted law school graduates into legal practice via the diploma privilege, Wisconsin is the only state that recognizes the privilege today. The bar examination is so central to the attorney admissions process that all but a handful of jurisdictions required it amidst a pandemic that turned bar exam administration into a life-or-death matter.

This Article analyzes the diploma privilege from a historical and empirical perspective. Whereas courts and regulators maintain that bar examinations screen out incompetent practitioners, the legal profession formerly placed little emphasis on bar examinations …

Aba Model Rule 8.4(G), Discriminatory Speech, And The First Amendment, Bruce Green, Rebecca Roiphe

Articles & Chapters

The ABA adopted Model Rule 8.4(g), which targets certain speech and conduct that are based on “race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status.” In particular, according to the accompanying comment, Rule 8.4(g) reaches speech that is “derogatory and demeaning” or that “manifests bias or prejudice towards others” and is “harmful” (including, presumably, emotionally harmful). This rule targets a significant amount of speech that would be constitutionally protected if it were uttered by a nonlawyer. This article argues that there is no justification for treating lawyers differently from others in many …

Ethical Limits On Promising To Pay An Adverse Award Of Attorney’S Fees Against One’S Client, Chase C. Parsons

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Abstract forthcoming.

The Overreach Of Limits On 'Legal Advice', Lauren Sudeall

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Nonlawyers, including court personnel, are typically prohibited from providing legal advice. But definitions of “legal advice” are unnecessarily broad, creating confusion, disadvantaging self-represented litigants, and possibly raising due process concerns. This Essay argues for a narrower, more explicit definition of legal advice that advances, rather than undercuts, access to justice.

The Appearance Of Appearances, Michael Ariens

Faculty Articles

The Framers argued judicial independence was necessary to the success of the American democratic experiment. Independence required judges possess and act with integrity. One aspect of judicial integrity was impartiality. Impartial judging was believed crucial to public confidence that the decisions issued by American courts followed the rule of law. Public confidence in judicial decision making promoted faith and belief in an independent judiciary. The greater the belief in the independent judiciary, the greater the chance of continued success of the republic.

During the nineteenth century, state constitutions, courts, and legislatures slowly expanded the instances in which a judge was …

The Fall Of An American Lawyer, Michael Ariens

Faculty Articles

John Randall is the only former president of the American Bar Association to be disbarred. He wrote a will for a client, Lovell Myers, with whom Randall had been in business for over a quarter-century. The will left all of Myers’s property to Randall, and implicitly disinherited his only child, Marie Jensen. When Jensen learned of the existence of a will, she sued to set it aside. She later filed a complaint with the Iowa Committee on Professional Ethics and Conduct. That complaint was the catalyst leading to Randall’s disbarment.

Randall had acted grievously in serving as Lovell Myers’s attorney. …

Practicing With Conviction: Race, Reentry, And The Legal Profession, Nicole Smith Futrell

Faculty Scholarship

Within recent years, different areas of the legal community have publicly addressed the need for racial justice. The killing of George Floyd and the reckoning with race that followed prompted law schools, bar associations, and court systems, as well as government, private, and non-profit legal organizations, to publicly acknowledge that racial disparities continue to persist in our society. While most of these legal institutions have made some recognition of the fact that the legal system has played a role in perpetuating systemic racism, they have essentially failed to address how discrimination against system-impacted individuals continues to deepen racial and socioeconomic …

Testing Privilege: Coaching Bar Takers Towards “Minimum Competency” During The 2020 Pandemic, Benjamin Afton Cavanaugh

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.

Menstrual Dignity And The Bar Exam, Margaret E. Johnson, Marcy L. Karin, Elizabeth Cooper

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the issue of menstruation and the administration of the bar exam. Although such problems are not new, over the summer and fall of 2020, test takers and commentators took to social media to critique state board of law examiners’ (“BOLE”) policies regarding menstruation. These problems persist. Menstruators worry that if they unexpectedly bleed during the exam, they may not have access to appropriately sized and constructed menstrual products or may be prohibited from accessing the bathroom. Personal products that are permitted often must be carried in a clear, plastic bag. Some express privacy concerns that the see-through …

Professional Responsibility, Legal Malpractice, Cybersecurity, And Cyber-Insurance In The Covid-19 Era, Ethan S. Burger

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, law firms conformed their activities to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and state health authority guidelines by immediately reducing the size of gatherings, encouraging social distancing, and mandating the use of protective gear. These changes necessitated the expansion of law firm remote operations, made possible by the increased adoption of technological tools to coordinate workflow and administrative tasks, communicate with clients, and engage with judicial and governmental bodies.

Law firms’ increased use of these technological tools for carrying out legal and administrative activities has implications …

Negative Commentary—Negative Consequences: Legal Ethics, Social Media, And The Impact Of Explosive Commentary, Jan L. Jacobowitz Ms.

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Connecting and sharing on social media has opened communication channels and provided instantaneous information to billions of people worldwide. Commentary on current events, cases, and negative online reviews may be posted in an instant, often without pause or thought about the potential repercussions. This global phenomenon may not only provide news of the day updates, humor, and support for those in need but also is replete with ethical landmines for the unwary lawyer. Lawyers commenting on current events, their cases, or responding to a client’s negative online review, have suffered damage to their careers. In some instances, they have even …

Model Rule 8.4(G) And The Profession’S Core Values Problem, Michael Ariens

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Model Rule 8.4(g) declares it misconduct for a lawyer to “engage in conduct that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law.” The American Bar Association (ABA) adopted the rule in 2016 in large part to effectuate the third of its four mission goals: Eliminate Bias and Enhance Diversity. The ABA adopted these goals in 2008, and they continue to serve as ABA’s statement of its mission.

A …

Legal Education's Curricular Tipping Point Toward Inclusive Socratic Teaching, Jamie Abrams

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Two seismic curricular disruptions create a tipping point for legal education to reform and transform. COVID-19 abruptly disrupted the delivery of legal education. It aligned with a tectonic racial justice reckoning, as more professors and institutions reconsidered their content and classroom cultures, allying with faculty of color who had long confronted these issues actively. The frenzy of these dual disruptions starkly contrasts with the steady drumbeat of critical legal scholars advocating for decades to reduce hierarchies and inequalities in legal education pedagogy.

This context presents a tipping point supporting two pedagogical reforms that leverage this unique moment. First, it is …

Healthy Hives: Can Replacing Hierarchies With Intergroup Teams Transform Our Profession?, Heidi K. Brown

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Perceptions Of Lgbtqi+ Diversity In The Legal Profession: "It's Happening Slow, But It's Certainly Happening", Aidan Ricciardo, Stephen Puttick, Shane Rogers, Natalie Skead, Stella Tarrant, Melville Thomas

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

This article reports on a qualitative study aimed at understanding how LGBTQI+ law students and recent graduates perceive and experience the legal profession. While we found that several participants self-censor in interactions with the profession, others considered their LGBTQI+ identity as advantageous, enabling them to benefit from ‘diversity hiring’. Despite this, many participants regarded the legal profession as ‘conservative’ and influenced by the ‘old guard’, which remains unaccepting of LGBTQI+ identities. Participants also considered the profession to be more accepting of some LGBTQI+ identities than others. We conclude by suggesting strategies to improve perceptions and experiences of the profession.