Ed. note: Please welcome Renee Knake Jefferson back to the pages of Above the Law. Subscribe to her Substack, Legal Ethics Roundup, here.
Welcome to what captivates, haunts, inspires, and surprises me every week in the world of legal ethics.
Happy Monday!
Today marks exactly three years of the Legal Ethics Roundup. For some of you, that means we’ve started our Monday mornings together since August 2023.
Take a look at some stats:
- 143 Weekly Roundups (featuring 1,000+ Headlines & 300+ Reading Recommendations plus Reform Updates, Pop Culture, Trivia, Events & More)
- 24 Bonus Content Posts
- 3 Summer Reading Lists
- Legal Ethics & Democracy Tracker
- 500+ Job Listings
- 2,700+ Subscribers From 49 States and 55 Countries
Thank you for joining me on this journey. Writing the LER has given me the opportunity to reconnect with old friends and make new ones as we navigate the often extraordinary developments shaping the world of legal ethics. Along the way, I’ve also tried to make the newsletter a place where outstanding scholarship, thoughtful ideas, and meaningful service to the profession receive the attention they deserve. Whether you teach, practice, study, or simply care about legal ethics, I hope the LER has become a resource that informs, inspires, and supports your own work.
A brief note about the headlines: I do not write the headlines featured in the LER, nor does including an article necessarily signify my endorsement of its headline, framing, or conclusions. I try to include a wide range of perspectives and sources so we all can be aware of how legal ethics issues are being reported and discussed, whether we agree with the content or not. I curate a representative sampling of the legal ethics stories that have received attention during the past week, but I do not catalog every article published on a given topic. From time to time, readers understandably ask me about a headline as though I wrote it, so I wanted to clarify that the headlines are those chosen by the original publishers.
I also want to extend a special thank you to our paid subscribers. Your support makes helps sustain this work and helps keep the LER independent and accessible to everyone. If you’ve found value in the LER over the past year, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber.
To celebrate the LER’s third anniversary, I’m sharing some shoutouts below from subscribers over the past year before we cover last week’s headlines.
For the rest of August, I’ll be putting the Roundup on pause to catch up on a few writing projects and spend time with family. But don’t worry, I’ll be back after Labor Day to help make sense of whatever emerges in the field of legal ethics!
Now for the shoutouts.
LER Reader Shoutouts
Here are some of the great things subscribers have been saying in the LER’s third year.
- “Many thanks for all of the resources!”
- “Frankly, I need to have a Substack like yours as we go through this horrible time when the failure to maintain our allegiance to the ethical oath we all took, to maintain my sanity. Thank you.”
- “I appreciate your work!”
- “The legal field right now in the US is…tricky at best. But there are more people who actually believe that the rule of law shouldn’t be optional, and we need work like yours to keep us both updated and grounded.”
- “Thanks for doing this work.”
Do you know someone who would love the LER as much as these readers? If so, please share it.
Highlights from Last Week — Top 10 Headlines
#1 “Federal Judges Chastise Trump’s Justice Department for ‘Unlawful,’ ‘Unethical’ and ‘Unseemly’ Conduct.” From ProPublica: “ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases in which judges criticized the actions of federal prosecutors. In many, judges expressed frustration that they can no longer take the government at its word.” Read more here.
#2 “Lawyers Must Defend the Rule of Law, as the Founders Intended.” An op-ed from Evan Falchuk in The Fulcrum: “It shouldn’t be a surprise that so many of the 56 signers of the Declaration were lawyers. Lawyers swear an oath to the truth, to good faith, and to ethical conduct. In this year of the Declaration’s 250th anniversary, it’s important to remind lawyers of their oaths and their duty to defend against lawless, unethical behavior. At a time when it seems that more lawyers than ever are breaking faith with their oaths, the Declaration provides a model for how lawyers should respond. It sounds easy, but it’s not. In the face of repeated acts of dishonesty and bad faith from government lawyers and lawyers representing government officials, too many bar associations, law school deans, law firm leaders, and individual lawyers have avoided calling out this conduct. The common excuse is a desire to avoid being seen as taking sides in a political dispute. But these are not political disputes. These are lawyers, in public and in court, lying and misleading, often in service of illegal and unconstitutional ends.” Read more here.
#3 “How a Wonky Reference Manual for Judges Prompted a Firestorm Over Climate Change.” From NBC News: “The president has called for an investigation into the once-obscure scientific manual, and Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote its foreword, has faced calls to recuse herself from an upcoming case.” Read more here.
#4 “Inside Quinn Emanuel’s Court-Required Ethics Training.” From Law.com: “The law firm was sanctioned this past May and ordered to create ethics education courses after a judge found it committed ethical violations during a pharmaceutical advertising trial. A Northern California District Judge approved Quinn Emanuel’s eight-hour ethics training plan for its lawyers. In addition to the ethics training, Quinn was also fined $3 million for attorney misconduct in the case. The legal training will be led by outside experts and lawyers, and include a detailed postmortem on what went wrong in the original case.” Read more here.
#5 “How a Top Law Firm Went From Standing Up to Trump to Bending the Knee.” From The New York Times: “Paul Weiss was a progressive stalwart for decades and led the legal resistance against President Trump in his first term. Then it surrendered without a fight. This is the inside story of its transformation.” Read more here (gift link).
# 6 “NACDL Charts a Roadmap for Defenders to Put AI to Work, Ethically and Effectively, in the Fight for Fair Trials.” From a press release: “The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) has released a new white paper, Parity in Practice: The Defender’s Duty to Ethically Use AI, offering criminal defense lawyers a roadmap for putting generative artificial intelligence to work: thoughtfully, ethically, and to the benefit of their clients.” Read more here.
#7 “ABA Opinion on Role of Government Lawyers Spurs Rule Change Talk.” From Bloomberg Law: “Legal ethics experts see a new American Bar Association opinion on the duty government lawyers have to report suspected wrongdoing as a potential jumping off point for a broader push to adjust ethics rules. The July 22 opinion takes an expansive view of what kind of conduct could warrant reporting, suggesting that actions like ignoring a court order could qualify. The ABA document also discusses what government lawyers who feel like their allegations aren’t being taken seriously internally should do to raise concerns outside their own organization.” Read more here.
#8 “Law Firms Expand AI Roles Beyond C-Suite To Lawyer Ranks.” From Law360: “Jenner & Block is among a growing number of law firms expanding AI roles to the associate and partner levels in the hopes of finding future rainmakers.” Read more here.
#9 “Trademark Fight Over Atticus Name Tests Legal Ethics, Venture Funding.” From the Daily Journal – Cal Lawyer: “An Orange County lawyer named after Atticus Finch challenges a venture-backed legal technology company’s trademark, arguing its corporate structure violates trademark law and California’s restrictions on lawyer referral services.” Read more here.
#10 “Judge Kleinfeld’s Legal Ethics.” From Brad Wendel in his Legal Ethics Stuff Substack: “I could go on writing a tribute to Judge Kleinfeld, talking about the honor of clerking for him and telling more Alaska stories, but this is a legal ethics newsletter, so I will write instead about Judge Kleinfeld’s contributions to legal ethics. That sounds odd, I know, because he is not one of the judges who has produced significant scholarship in the field (like Marvin Frankel’s ‘Search for Truth’ lecture, or Jack Weinstein’s work on ethics in mass tort litigation). But Judge Kleinfeld cared a lot about what lawyers do. As smart and astonishingly well-read as he was, he wasn’t really an ‘academic’ judge, but one who was deeply practical and immersed in the day-to-day work of lawyers.” Read more here.
Get Hired
Did you miss the 500+ job postings from previous weeks? Find them all here.
Upcoming Ethics Events & Other Announcements
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Keep in Touch
- News tips? Announcements? Events? A job to post? Reading recommendations? Email legalethics@substack.com – but be sure to subscribe first, otherwise the email won’t be delivered.
- Teaching Professional Responsibility or Legal Ethics? Check out the companion blog for my casebook Professional Responsibility: A Contemporary Approach for teaching ideas and other resources.
As always, thank you for reading the LER. See you in September!
Renee Knake Jefferson holds the endowed Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics and is a Professor of Law at the University of Houston. Check out more of her writing at the Legal Ethics Roundup. Find her on X (formerly Twitter) at @reneeknake or Bluesky at legalethics.bsky.social.
The post Legal Ethics Roundup: The ‘Unethical’ DOJ, A Biglaw Firm’s Court-Required Ethics Training, ‘Bending The Knee’ To Trump & More appeared first on Above the Law.