Issues Facing Law Firm Ethics Counsel

Many law firms, particularly larger ones, designate attorneys or committees to address and resolve a variety of issues, from hiring, legal and insurance concerns to ethics issues. In this article, I focus upon the ethics function, and the unique ethics issues that are faced today by law firm ethics counsel. Some firms combine the ethics function with “general counsel” tasks, and others empower their ethics attorney or committee to decide business conflict issues as well. However the law firm decides to design the administrative structure to address ethics issues, the base underlying principles for ethics counsel remain the same. Like every other area of the law, attorneys who provide ethics advice to clients are bound by the applicable Rules of Professional Conduct. Even when the law firm is the client, e.g., even when the advice is only given within the law firm, ethics rules will usually come into play. But, in comparison with advising a paying client, the practical and legal ramifications flowing from the intra-firm work of law firm ethics attorneys are fairly unique.