Ethical Lawyering A Guide for the Well-Intentioned [Connected eBook with Study Center]

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Professional Responsibility professors often struggle to engage students in this required course—one that many students wouldn’t otherwise have chosen to take—covering material that simultaneously appears both obvious and intricately technical. This coursebook responds to these challenges with a fresh look at teaching and learning PR. Instead of containing the impenetrable cases typical of PR casebooks, which force students and teachers to sort out convoluted facts and incomplete or out-of-date analysis, this book “flips the classroom” by providing detailed explanations of the Model Rules, accompanied by problems for class discussion that require students to explore how the Rules apply in real-world situations. This structure lends itself easily to use in both in-person and online courses. The book’s explanations are focused on building statutory interpretation skills, and then bringing these skills to common practice scenarios and exploring both the legal and the practical demands they present. Discussion covers all aspects of the law governing lawyers, from professional discipline to civil liability to court sanctions, as well as informal concerns, such as misconduct’s potential effects on both client relations and the business of law practice.

New to the Second Edition:

• New or expanded discussion of recent doctrinal developments, including:
  • The advent of artificial intelligence and other new technology
  • Numerous authoritative interpretations of the Model Rules in recent ABA Formal Ethics Opinions and opinions from state and local bar associations
  • The potential implications of the amendments to Model Rule 1.16 regarding mandatory abstention or withdrawal from engagements in which a client may misuse the lawyer’s work product in unlawful conduct
• Materials designed to make a course using the book compliant with the new features of ABA Standards 303(b) and (c), including new or expanded discussion of:
  • Professional identity formation
  • The stresses of law practice and lawyer well-being
  • Cross-cultural competence
  • Ethical issues involved in providing everyone with an equal opportunity to succeed in legal education, bar admission, and legal employment

Benefits for instructors and students:

• A statutory construction approach to the Model Rules designed to build text-interpretation skills.
• Features in the digital edition enabling students to call up with one click and review on-screen the text of a Model Rule, Comment, or other statute side-by-side with the textbook’s discussion of that text.
• A detailed Glossary of recurring terms of art, with features in the digital edition allowing students to access the Glossary definition of a term with a single click on that term.
• “Signposts” throughout alerting the student to categories of issues that commonly arise in legal ethics doctrine and practice, including Taming the Text, Rule Roles, Reason for the Rule, Consequences, Real World, Tips & Tactics, and Your House; Your Rules.
• Realistic problems, drawn from the authors’ extensive practice experience, introducing students to the world of law practice and common real-world pitfalls while applying and reinforcing doctrinal concepts.
• “Big-Picture Takeaways” at the end of each chapter reviewing and summarizing the material.
• MPRE-style multiple-choice review questions at the end of each chapter designed to prepare students for the MPRE.
• A comprehensive treatment of the law regulating lawyers, considering all of the practical hazards that lawyers face, and illustrating the connections between the Model Rules as a basis for professional discipline and the law of torts (fiduciary duty and malpractice), contracts (scope of the attorney-client relationship and engagement agreements), agency (authority), and procedure (sanctions), as well as informal concerns such as client relations and reputational issues.
• An informal, irreverent, down-to-earth, and conversational style that is meant to be accessible and relatable to Millennial and GenZ students, and to draw them into appreciating the importance of the subject matter to their own career success by encouraging them to put themselves into the “hot seats” that the problems describe.

Summary of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments 
About the Authors 

Introduction 
1 How to Use This Book 

UNIT I Working in a Regulated Profession 
2 What Lawyers Do, and Where They Do It 
3 Regulating Lawyer Conduct: Where Guidance
and Consequences Come From 
4 Why Smart People Do Stupid Things: Cognitive
Biases and the Stresses of Practice

UNIT II The Attorney-Client Relationship 
5 The Lawyer as Fiduciary
6 The Lawyer as Agent
7 The Duties of Competence, Diligence, and Care 
8 The Duty of Confidentiality
9 Creation, Assumption, Disclaimer, and
Termination of a Lawyer’s Duties 

UNIT III Duties to Third Parties and the Public 
10 Avoiding Misrepresentation 
11 Duties to People Who Have (or Must Be Treated
as If They Had) Their Own Lawyers 
12 Duties to Unrepresented Persons
13 Involvement in a Client’s Wrongdoing: Advising, Assisting,
Condoning, Aiding and Abetting, Conspiring
14 Unnecessarily Embarrassing, Delaying,
or Burdening Others 
15 Avoiding Invidious Discrimination 
16 Threatening to Report and Reporting Wrongdoing 
17 Offering or Agreeing to Restrict Your Future Practice 
18 Advertising and Solicitation 

UNIT IV Some Realities of Practice 
19 The Organizational Environment 
20 Fees and Fee-Sharing 
21 Safeguarding, Segregating, and Accounting
for Others’ Funds and Property 

Unit V Challenges and Complications
When Duties and Interests Collide 
22 Conflicts of Interest 
23 Representing Organizations and Their Constituents
24 Ethics in Advocacy
25 The Government Lawyer 

UNIT VI Judicial Ethics 
26 Judicial Ethics 
Glossary of Recurring Defined Terms

Table of Cases 
Index