A Word on Legal Malpractice and Legal Ethics Links.

You have a legal malpractice problem or you are doing research on a specific legal ethics topic.  Either way, you probably want the links below, to help you find the specific law involved in your problem or topic.

A few links scattered below will get you to interesting reading material.  It is our hope that all attorneys will read legal ethics materials, just as you read your state's recent case law decisions, once a month or so.  If for no other reason than to stay out of legal malpractice, and avoid a visit from your state grievance committee, you should keep reasonably current on legal ethics.

ABA Code of Professional Responsibility.  The original 32 Canons of Professional Ethics were adopted by the American Bar Association in 1908. They were based principally on the Code of Ethics adopted by the Alabama State Bar Association in 1887, which in turn has been borrowed largely from the lectures of Judge George Sharswood, published in 1854 under the title of Professional Ethics, and from the fifty resolutions included in David Hoffman's A Course of Legal Study (2d ed. 1836).  In  1964, the American Bar Association created a Special Committee on Evaluation of Ethical Standards to examine the then current Canons of Professional Ethics and to make recommendations for changes. That committee produced the Model Code of Professional Responsibility which was adopted by the House of Delegates in 1969.  It was adopted in some form by all states.

ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct.  The ABA Code of Professional Responsibility was in turn the subject of various revisions.  In 1983, it was replaced by this version, nyperlinked here, of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Responsibility.  44 States base their codes on this version of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, but usually there is some small variances.  

ABA Model Rules, Updated.  In 2001, the ABA House began debate of Report 401, the Ethics 2000 Commission's recommended changes to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, The changes to the Model Rules as proposed by the Commission and amended by the House during its debate became official ABA policy at the completion of the House vote on the Report on February 5, 2002. The ABA Model Rules which are hyperlinked here (to the on-line version of the Model Rules) includes the Ethics 2000 changes made in February 2002, as well as the Multijurisdictional Practice Commission and Ethics Committee changes from August 2002.   The comments have been greatly expanded, and should be read when reading the rules themselves.

The ABA Standing Committee on Lawyers Professional Liability and the National Legal Malpractice Data Center are good sources for information on legal malpractice claim statistics, insurance for lawyers, and malpractice prevention information and help.

The ABA/BNA Lawyers' Manual on Professional Conduct is widely available in law libraries and is also available on Westlaw in the database ABA-BNA. The Lawyers' Manual also has digests of thousands of state and local bar association ethics opinions.

A good portal to find legal ethics resources in each state of the Union is found at  sunEthics.

An ABA  bibliography of legal ethics resource materials that are found in many law libraries is at the ethics section of the Center for Professional Responsibility at  http://www.abanet.org

Westlaw databases of interest include: :

• METH-EO (full text of ethics opinions from about 20 states the last time I looked)
• METH-CS (state case law that focuses on ethics and professional discipline)
• ETH-TP (law review articles that focus on legal ethics.)

I have always like the ethics opinions of the New York Bar Association.  They are well reasoned, but short, on a number of topics.

ABA staff lawyers offer free ethics research (up to a point) for ABA members, at ambar.org/ethicsnow.

Important point --- ABA Center for Professional Responsibility – for lawyers -easily the most feature-laden site of the Internet web, the Center for Professional Responsibility (CPR) is the home to the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct. In addition to rules regulating lawyers, you’ll also find codes of judicial conduct and client protection, as well as ETHICSearch, a feature that allows you to ask ethics questions, many times for free.

ETHICSearch of the ABA Center is a fast and economical way to find the right resources to help resolve your ethics questions. Staffed by lawyers experienced in legal ethics research, you'll receive citations to relevant ABA rules, opinions, and other ethics resources.  More information about the ABA ETHICSearch is at www.abanet.org/cpr/ethicsearch/home.html

Most searches are free of charge! There's no charge for an initial consultation or if the ETHICSearch lawyer can answer your question immediately.  If you ask for additional research, you will be charged an hourly rate of $30.00 for members of the Center for Professional Responsibility; double that for non-members. To get started, send an e-mail to ethicsearch@staff.abanet.org. or phone  800-285-2221.

The ABA Center for Professional Responsibility site also offers links on multidisciplinary and multijurisdictional practice. Some resources require you to be a member of the Center; e.g., for  access to all ABA formal ethics opinions, the member directory, and two quarterly publications.

The following are quick links to their list of internet ethics research sites and to the materials they have at the center.

ABA Standing Committee on Lawyers' Professional Liability – The Committee provides information on legal malpractice claims statistics, insurance for lawyers, and malpractice prevention information and help – issues that go hand-in-hand with any discussion of legal ethics. It offers a number of useful resources and a newsletter.

American Legal Ethics Library – this terrific site provides links to most of the professional responsibility codes in the country. You can use the Listing by Jurisdiction to get right to the rules of any particular state; 18 of them (17 states plus the District of Columbia) have narratives on their professional conduct law. Even better, the Topical Overview allows you to see the differences between specific code provisions in these eighteen jurisdictions.

Boundaries of Legal Marketing -- Will Hornsby is one of the leading authorities on legal ethics, especially on how the rules apply to Internet activities. He's recently started a blog that will cover legal ethics topics.

Center for Applied Ethics was formed by the University of San Francisco School of Law, in 2000, as a forum for dialogue about teaching and applying legal ethics.   It is a forum, really geared to the academic.

Charles Luce on Legal Ethics is an excellent collection of legal ethic articles, collected by an attorney of the Colorado bar.

Codes Of Ethics Online.  The Center of the Study of Codes of Ethics of the Professions, at the Illinois Institute of Technology has an extensive collection of codes of ethics on the web. They include those codes of ethics of professional societies, corporations, government, and academic institutions, of the over 850 codes we have in our paper archive, who gave us permission to include their code.  A literature review, and some articles are also available.

Ethics and Lawyering Today This newsletter delivering short descriptions of important new cases, opinions, and other developments, often with links to full text documents, stopped publishing in 2004.  Too bad.  It was well done when it published. Bill Freivogel was one of the two editors, and still has his own website - see below.

Freivogel on Conflicts -- Bill Freivogel masterminds this sites as a "practical online guide to conflicts of interest for lawyers with sophisticated business and litigation practices."The site is regularly updated with new case law and other information.  It is a a practical online guide to conflicts of interest for lawyers. Reasonably short articles on various aspects of conflicts of interest.

FindLaw: Ethics and Professional Responsibility Listing    Findlaw does find law.  Here is the entry to Findlaw's ethics and professional responsibility links.

LegalEthics.com -- Showing what active law professors can do when they recognize the present needs of lawyers, this site is maintained by Mercer Law professor David Hricik and Peter Krakaur. Just select a category and a topic, and you will find material of interest..  Hricik also has his own Legal Ethics and Risk Management Page that provides other articles, links and discussions on the subject.  Hrick writes and collects legal ethics articles that are practical and to the point.  He has a free newsletter of current items on which he is interested.

LegalEthics.com  may have the largest collection of links to legal ethics sites available on the world wide web.  Legal ethics.com, perhaps the Web's oldest ethics site, is the place to go if you want to know the ethics codes and rules of a specific state, or are new to researching what a particular state says on a legal ethics topic.  This site will lead you to a specific state's legal resources on the web about their ethics and legal malpractice cases.

It is worth repeating that Cornell and Legal Ethics.com have the largest collection of links to legal ethics sites available on the world wide web.  On Cornell's site, rather hidden, on the right side of the home page, is a state by state access to ethics codes and rules of the states.  It is not as good as LegalEthics.com's listing. The reason to go to Cornell Law Library is because Cornell hosts the American Legal Ethics Library of the Legal Information Institute, which offers narratives drafted for the American Legal Ethics Library. If they have an article on your state, you are well on the way to researching the ethics rules of that state. 

Legal Ethics Forum -- three law school educators from different parts of the country have joined together to create a terrific weblog featuring constantly-updated materials on issues in legal ethics. Recent topics include interviewing jurors, conflict checks, disciplinary review, and lawyer advertising. The sidebar also contains some great ethics resources, especially the academic sites and journals.

Legal Ethics Opinion Summaries -- McGuire Woods attorney Tim Spahn has prepared summaries of Virginia and ABA Legal Ethics Opinions, and made them available free of charge. You can search the summaries by topic, date, or by keyword.

State Ethics Links – this site from David Hricik provides links to ethics opinions, rules of professional conduct, and other ethics resources from all fifty states.

sunEthics -- although this site is primarily geared to Florida lawyers (and the Florida resources are great!), there's also a page of state-by-state ethics links, as well as national ethics sites.

Virtual Chase Legal Ethics Guide -- Genie Tyburski's wonderful Virtual Chase site is the host for this research guide on legal ethics. This pathfinder will lead you to federal agencies, state ethics sites, and other top resources in legal ethics.

WEX - Legal Ethics - WEX is Cornell's version of a legal Wikipedia. It's an online legal encyclopedia created by a volunteer group of contributing authors. It is a new idea on education and may be the wave of the future.  Compare it to the entry on legal ethics on the Wikipedia. ng

Neoethics Note: "Neoethics" was a term originated by Bucklin and used on eDicta. If you notice that a few (very few of the total) pages at Bucklin.Org are like ones that were at eDicta, it is because Bucklin is the author of these pages and also was the managing and a contributing editor of eDicta for several years. eDicta is no longer published. Bucklin was authorized to simultaneously publish and archive on this site content from various pages he authored on eDicta.