Author: Kirkland, Kimberly

Source: Legal Ethics, Volume 11, Number 2, September 2008 , pp. 181-200(20)

Publisher: Hart Publishing

Abstract:

This paper reports on a qualitative empirical study exploring the evolving role of ethics counsel in large law firms in the United States. On the basis of extensive interviews with lawyers formally charged with responsibility for institutional ethics in their large law firms, the study asked what ethical issues ethics counsel attempt to address and how they attempt to address those issues. The paper examines ethics counsels' conceptions of their roles and the assumptions and beliefs that frame their decision-making. The paper reports the study's findings that currently ethics counsel and the ethical infrastructures they design and implement are primarily focused on the norms that govern lawyers' loyalty to their clients and the ethics rules designed to protect a client from lawyers and firms with conflicting interests. In contrast, most ethics counsel spend relatively little time in their formal role as ethics counsel addressing norms relating to a lawyer's independence from his client.

Keywords: LEGAL PROFESSION; GENERAL COUNSEL; ETHICS COUNSEL; ETHICAL INFRASTRUCTURE; NORMS; CONFLICT OF INTEREST; PROFESSIONAL INDEPENDENCE; LARGE LAW FIRMS; EMPIRICAL STUDY; FRAMING

Document Type: Research article

Publication date: 2008-09-01

More about this publication?

• Legal Ethics is an international and interdisciplinary journal devoted to the field of legal ethics.
  The journal provides an intellectual meeting ground for academic lawyers, practitioners and policy-makers to debate developments shaping the ethics of law and its practice at the micro and macro levels.
  Its focus is broad enough to encompass empirical research on the ethics and conduct of the legal professions and judiciary, studies of legal ethics education and moral development, ethics development in contemporary professional practice, the ethical responsibilities of law schools, professional bodies and government, and jurisprudential or wider philosophical reflections on law as an ethical system and on the moral obligations of individual lawyers.
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