Legal Ethics in the Practice of Law

This new Fourth Edition of Legal Ethics in the Practice of Law continues its practice-oriented, "real world," problem-driven approach to teaching legal ethics, the approach pioneered in this volume's first three editions. At the same time, this edition includes major revisions and updates that reflect the substantial changes occurring in the world of legal ethics since the last edition was published in 2007.

While the core problems remain largely unchanged, this new edition embodies global revisions that reflect the important changes in this field since the last edition: extensively revised narrative text, and new excerpts from dozens of articles and cases. After considerable deliberation, the authors consciously decided to choose full coverage over brevity to avoid any superficial treatment of the increasingly broad subject matter in this rapidly-developing area of law.

Highlights of the changes and updates in this new edition include:


• An increased emphasis on wellness and satisfaction, including: a recent, detailed, prescriptive article and the authors' own insights; specific discussion of how to develop trust between lawyer and client; an ongoing focus on experiential learning; and deeper discussions about mentoring and the adequacy of the current law school curriculum.

• Updated readings on technology, including "virtual" law offices; "friending" and tweeting; on-line participation in Avvo, Groupon, LinkedIn, etc.; seven recent ethics opinions on lawyers' use of the Cloud; and a review of the 2012-13 rules changes stemming from the ABA Ethics 20/20 Commission.

• Detailed discussion of the state of the law on the ethical requirements of electronic discovery, including a thorough analysis of the four Zubulake and four Qualcomm cases.

• Updated readings reflecting the evolution of conflicts of interest law including recent ABA rules changes, especially regarding disqualification, law firm imputation, advance waivers, and screening.

• Confidentiality and the current cutting-edge issue of whether law firms should be able to consult themselves confidentially about mistakes on their own clients' cases;

• Confidentiality and the wrongfully convicted.

• Expansion of the class action problem to include the ethics of increasingly-common representation in mass multi-plaintiff cases.

• Extensive revisions and expansion of material on multi-cultural and cross cultural lawyering.

• An entire reworking and modernization of the problem on advertising and solicitation.