Legal Profession Blog

Call for submissions and nominations for Zacharias Prize

As shared by our friend Samuel Levine at Touro Law School:

Submissions and nominations of articles are being accepted for the fourteenth annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility. To honor Fred's memory, the committee will select from among articles in the field of Professional Responsibility with a publication date of 2023. The prize will be awarded at the 2024 AALS Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. Please send submissions and nominations to Professor Samuel Levine at Touro Law Center: [email protected]. The deadline for submissions and nominations is September 1, 2023.

(posted by Alan Childress)

Lipshaw's book on legal reasoning--and beyond--is now published

We are pleased to announce good news about our founding co-editor Jeff Lipshaw: Routledge has just published his book Beyond Legal Reasoning: A Critique of Pure Lawyering. It takes on the cramped view of lawyering and legal argumentation that is traditionally taught in law school, especially in 1L classes. The publisher writes:

This book offers an avenue for getting beyond (or unlearning) merely how to think like a lawyer. It combines legal theory, philosophy of knowledge, and doctrine with an appreciation of real-life judgment calls that multi-disciplinary lawyers are called upon to make. The book will be of great interest to scholars of legal education, legal language and reasoning as well as professors who teach both doctrine and thinking and writing skills in the first year law school curriculum; and for anyone who is interested in seeking a perspective on ‘thinking like a lawyer’ beyond the litigation arena.

Keep an eye on his SSRN author page, as he will soon post the Preface as an excerpt. And from the press's bio page, we learn that his middle name is Marc. Congrats, Jeff! [Alan Childress]

Mainero on Law Schools, "Academic Support," and Bar Exam Prep Programs

Mario Mainero (Chapman, Law) has posted to SSRN his paper, "We Should Not Rely on Commercial Bar Reviews to Do Our Job: Why Labor-Intensive Comprehensive Bar Examination Preparation Can and Should Be a Part of the Law School Mission." It's a draft at this point and he welcomes comments (here's his email: [email protected]). And here's his abstract:

Increasingly, law school bar passage rates are an important concern for faculty and administration, as well as students. The July 2014 bar exam saw a precipitous drop nationally in bar passage rates, including declines ranging from four to over twenty percentage points. At the same time, there have been declines in applications to law schools, declines in admissions statistics (LSAT and undergraduate GPA), and an empirically demonstrable decline in student preparedness for law school. The confluence of these events portends even greater declines in bar passage if law schools do not rethink how they prepare students for the bar exam. This Article examines developments in academic support and bar preparation programs with an eye toward suggesting models for effective in-house bar preparation programs. Specifically, this Article examines: (1) the evolution of academic support programs in law schools to include bar passage programs, with a brief description of the types of programs that traditionally have been available; (2) the particular difficulty posed by the California Bar Exam; (3) the existing types of supplemental programs, and concerns posed by programs that are limited to “bar tips” or even limited practice exams or substantive lectures, given the increased numbers of “at risk” students due to the increase in underpreparedness; (4) the supplemental program at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law, including the intensity of effort required of both faculty and students in a comprehensive program applicable to all students; and finally, (5) the bar passage results at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since adoption of a comprehensive supplemental bar passage program, that have been significantly better than would be expected by some commentators, given its ranking and relative youth as a law school. This Article suggests that the traditional focus of academic support programs, including bar preparation programs, that focus largely on perceived “at risk” students, is insufficient in light of the increased numbers of underprepared students. In order to avoid further calamitous declines in bar passage rates, law schools will have to move from traditional academic support models to models that encourage the entire cohort of students to work together, cooperatively, and that apply extensive time and effort to ensure that all students receive the benefit of these programs.

Thanks, Mario. [Alan Childress]

Zacharias Prize Winner Announced

Samuel Levine of Touro Law reports to us that:

The winner has been selected for the fifth annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility. The Prize will be awarded to Russell M. Gold, for Beyond the Judicial Fourth Amendment: The Prosecutor’s Role, 47 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1591 (2014).

The Prize will be awarded in January at the Section Lunch of the AALS Section on Professional Responsibility.

Thanks for the news, Sam, and congrats to Prof. Gold (of  NYU Law, whom coincidentally I taught at GW).  (Alan Childress)

Call for Nominations for 5th Annual Fred C. Zacharias Prize

The deadline now less than a month away, so it is a good time to remind people of this important opportunity in legal scholarship:

Submissions and nominations of articles are now being accepted for the fifth annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility.  To honor Fred’s memory, the committee will select from among articles in the field of Professional Responsibility with a publication date of 2014.  The prize will be awarded at the 2015 AALS Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.  Please send submissions and nominations to Professor Samuel Levine at Touro Law Center: email [email protected].  The deadline for submissions and nominations is September 1, 2014.

Our thanks to Sam Levine for the notice. [Alan Childress]

Hricik on Judges Having "Friends" and Other Tech Issues of Judicial Ethics

David Hricik (Mercer, Law) has posted to SSRN a useful paper for judges, but also for the rest of us interested in how their ethics are affected by new technologies (and how to deal with lawyer ethics of using tech). It is titled Technology and Judicial Ethics and its abstract is:

This paper was written for judges to assist them in understanding: their obligations concerning Facebook and other social networking sites, including "friending" lawyers; the confidentiality of email, texts, and other e-communications; the use of the Internet by lawyers to research jurors or potential jurors; the use of the Internet by judges to research the facts and law; and how to admonish jurors not to use the Internet to research the case before them or to discuss it prior to deliberations.

[Alan Childress]

Dru Stevenson on being Against Confidentiality

Two points to make about confidentiality, just as all us ethics profs are about to (spoiler alert) examine on it. One is that I note that there is an interesting article in the current Litigation magazine (the ABA's journal by the Section on Litgation) on whether confidentiality and privilege survive death. It's not yet posted on their website, so look for it in print or anticipate it online. It notes that the successor law firm to Lizzie Borden's counsel circa 1892 is still safeguarding its (really, her) records. I foresee a poem about the privilege here, but what rhymes with "privilege"? One point six does not quite rhyme with ax.

The more accessible point is that Drury D. Stevenson (South Texas, Law) has posted to SSRN an article that, to me, follows in the tradition of the late Fred Zacahrias. Dru's title is Against Confidentiality and his abstract is:

Confidentiality rules form an important part of the ethical codes for lawyers, as a modern, expansive extension of the traditional attorney-client privilege doctrine. The legal academy, judiciary, and practitioners generally agree on the conventional wisdom that strict confidentiality rules are necessary to foster client-lawyer communication, thereby providing lawyers with information they need for effective representation. Yet this premise is demonstrably false – clients withhold information or lie to their lawyers despite the confidentiality rules, and the rules are mostly redundant with other ethical rules, evidentiary doctrines, and effective market mechanisms for protecting client privacy interests. At the same time, the confidentiality rules impose significant social costs – direct externalities, lemons effects, and even serious harm to third parties.

This Article argues that the lawyer confidentiality rules are ripe for repeal, revision, or rejection in the form of civil disobedience in certain cases. Using analytical tools from economics, including the Coase Theorem, this Article goes beyond previous criticisms of the rules to provide an extensive analysis of the social costs – and illusory benefits – of the ethical rules that compel lawyers to conceal client secrets. The rules undermine public trust in the legal system, and overall transparency and cooperation in society. In extreme instances, the rules facilitate wrongful convictions of innocent third parties and other serious harms. In relation to the other ethical rules, the confidentiality rules are generally in tension with, or redundant of, other rules designed to protect clients and third parties. The Article concludes with specific normative proposals for revising the rules, or challenging the existing rules as a way to force reforms.

[Alan Childress]

Konefsky and Sullivan on Placing the Big Changes to Legal Practice and Legal Education into a Broader Context of the Profession

Alfred Konefsky (SUNY University at Buffalo, Law) and Barry Sullivan (Loyola-Chicago, Law) have posted to SSRN their fascinating paper, "In This, the Winter of Our Discontent: Legal Practice, Legal Education, and the Culture of Distrust." It will be published in Buffalo Law Review. Its abstract:

This essay seeks to situate the challenges facing legal education within the broader context of professional culture — a context that seems to us to have been neglected in the present debates. In a sense, the “market reformers” have been swept up, consciously or not, in a wider movement that elevates markets over other forms of social analysis and therefore asserts and takes for granted what is in fact deeply contested. More specifically, they have pushed to the side the public-serving dimension of the lawyer’s role because it allegedly conflicts with the psychology of classical economic liberalism. Our aim, then, is to restore the concept of the public domain to a discussion now dominated by mere considerations of costs and a belief in the inevitable triumph of a narrowed sense of professional culture. Before we can begin to reform the infrastructures of legal education, we need to identify the function of the legal profession in a democratic society and the role that a legal education might play in preparing men and women for service in a profession so conceived. In that sense, cost is not an independent variable, and any judgment about the cost-effectiveness of legal education necessarily depends on a decision concerning the purposes to be served by a legal education.

In Part I, we discuss, in a general way, some of the changes that have occurred in society, the profession, and legal education in the past 40 years or so. We are particularly interested in the growing tendency to re-conceptualize many social phenomena in market terms and the effects of this trend on legal education and the practice of law. In Part II, we continue our discussion of those themes, as they relate to the current debate over the future of legal education, by considering the analyses of Thomas D. Morgan and Brian Z. Tamanaha, both of whom approach the problem from the vantage point of economic analysis. Notwithstanding the similarities in their methodologies, their respective prescriptions point in somewhat different directions. We suggest that a broader view is necessary and that the work of these commentators and others suffers from a failure to give sufficient attention to the public dimension and significance of the legal profession. In Part III, we endeavor to reframe the problem in a way that may be useful in developing a forward-looking approach to accomplishing the reforms that are necessary.

Definitely worth a read, especially for its taking the costs meme from Tamanaha's Failing Law Schools and others to a different level. [Alan Childress]

Bruce Green on the Lawyer's Independence

Recently posted to SSRN is a new paper by Bruce Green (Fordham), entitled Lawyers’ Professional Independence: Overrated or Undervalued? It is an article for the Akron Law Review. Here is a summary:

This article explores the concept of lawyers’ "professional independence" in the literature of the U.S. legal profession. It begins with some reflections on the conventional meanings of professional independence, which encompasses both the bar’s collective independence to regulate its members and individual lawyers’ independence in the context of professional representations, including independence from clients, on one hand, and independence from third parties, on the other. The article suggests that the professional conduct rules are overly preoccupied with protecting lawyers’ professional independence from the corrupting influences of other professionals. The article then turns to an aspect of professional independence that has largely dropped out of lawyers’ discourse but that deserves more attention, namely, lawyers’ independence from the courts. This includes: (1) freedom to criticize judges; (2) freedom to disobey arguably unlawful court orders; and (3) freedom to resolve certain ethical dilemmas for oneself, as a matter of professional conscience. The article maintains that as the bar has become strongly identified and allied with the judiciary, motivated by the interests in securing judicial protection from other government regulation and in securing the bar’s own institutional influence over individual lawyers, the bar has ignored this understanding and redefined professional independence consistently with a strong judicial role in regulating lawyers.

[Alan Childress]

Dinovitzer, Garth & Sterling Question (Empirically) Current Meme of Buyers' Remorse in Going to Law School

New at SSRN is Buyers' Remorse? An Empirical Assessment of the Desirability of a Legal Career by acclaimed law-and-society scholars Ronit Dinovitzer (Toronto), Bryant Garth (now at UC Irvine, in addition to ABF and Southwestern), and Joyce Sterling (Denver). Their abstract:

The literature attacking the value of legal education relies as a rule on the idea that individuals attend non-elite law schools because of optimism bias -- thinking they will get the lucrative corporate jobs deemed necessary to pay off educational debt. They presumably would then get buyers' remorse when their optimism proves unjustified. Drawing on the first two waves of the only longitudinal data on lawyer careers, the After the J.D. Study, the authors examine whether those who began their careers in the year 2000 -- with substantial debt even if not as high as today's graduates -- showed evidence of buyers' remorse about their decision to get a law degree. The evidence indicates that law graduates beyond the most elite were able to pay down their debt at the same rate or better than most elite law graduates. In addition, after seven years of practice the great majority of these lawyers were still satisfied with their decision to become lawyers. In fact, there is no statistically significant difference in reported satisfaction with the decision to become a lawyer when we compare graduates from the higher and lower ranked law schools. And while there is some suggestion that lawyers who reported still owing more than $100,000 after seven years of practice were either ambivalent or dissatisfied with their decision to invest in a legal career, multivariate models show that percent of debt remaining seven-eight years into one's career has no significant relationship with career satisfaction. Thus, in contrast to the dominant story, most respondents irrespective of debt are extremely or moderately satisfied with their decision to become a lawyer. There is no indication in our data that these law graduates feel they made a mistake by choosing to go to law school. The data also show that those most likely to favor eliminating the third year of law school were elite law graduates and attorneys in large corporate law firms -- again a contrast to the dominant story.

Check it out. [Alan Childress]

Right to Counsel 50 Years After Gideon Examined in new Yale LJ Symposium

The Yale Law Journal's final issue of the academic year, June 2013, is a thorough and compelling Symposium: "The Gideon Effect - Rights, Justice, and Lawyers Fifty Years After Gideon v. Wainwright." I recommend its over 600 pages of articles from 25 leading voices, including Mike's GULC colleagues Paul Butler and Neal Kumar Katyal, and mine at Tulane, Pamela Metzger. Topics range from   civil counsel to immigration, from Guantanamo to the El Paso PD Office to international law and the EU -- in addition to detailed examinations of the central mission of providing counsel in indigent criminal defense representations. In addition to the print issue's availability from the Journal and from libraries, the Kindle at Amazon, Nook at B&N, and Apple (direct from iBooks) versions are already available for a nominal download cost (ebooks created through my Quid Pro project). It really is a law review issue that reads more like an extensive and worthwhile new book on this important subject, and IMO it is accessible to nonlawyers and others interested in the state of this fundamential right. [Alan Childress]

Related articles

Metzger on Gideon & Under-Enforcement of Sixth  Amendment Rights

Green on Gideon's Amici

Chemerinsky on Gideon

"Race and the Disappointing Right to Counsel"

 An Immigration Gideon?

Lisa Dolak on Civil Litigation Failure and Ethics Lapses, Especially in IP Cases

Recently posted on SSRN is an article by Syracuse's Lisa Dolak called Trial Lawyers in Trouble: Litigation Misconduct and Its Ethics Fallout. Its abstract is:

Misconduct in civil litigation is not a new phenomenon. Nor is it confined to particular types of cases. Because of their characteristic intensity, however, intellectual property cases may be more likely to inspire bad behavior than other types of cases. In patent cases, in particular, often much is at stake for both counsel and client. The potential outcomes range from a judgment for the patent owner, potentially including trebled lost profits, a permanently enjoined infringer and even an attorney fees award, to a ruling that the asserted patent is partly or entirely invalid, or even unenforceable, with the patent owner ordered to pay the infringement defendant’s attorney fees. And the complexity and potential intensity only increase when multiple patents and/or multiple accused products are involved. The associated pressures seem, on occasion, to lead litigants and trial lawyers to succumb to the temptation to step outside the bounds of vigorous advocacy.

Where to draw the line can be a challenging question. And the stakes are high. Courts have the power to impose a wide variety of sanctions on parties and their counsel. The lawyers involved risk injury to their reputations and even, potentially, bar discipline. Following an overview of the key sanctions regimes available to the federal courts, this paper draws on some recent IP decisions examining litigation conduct to illustrate the range of conduct with which courts must contend and the application of various sanctions frameworks.

[Alan Childress]

Nominations for Prestigious Prize in Professional Responsibility Scholarship

Word from our long-time reader Sam Levine at Touro:

Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility

Submissions and nominations of articles are now being accepted for the fourth annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility. To honor Fred's memory, the committee will select from among articles in the field of Professional Responsibility with a publication date of 2013. The prize will be awarded at the 2014 AALS Annual Meeting in New York. Please send submissions and nominations to Professor Samuel Levine at Touro Law Center: [email protected]

The deadline for submissions and nominations is September 1, 2013.

Fred is shown right; we miss him. [Alan Childress]

Rebecca Aviel Earns Zacharias Prize

Touro Law Center's Samuel Levine let us know that the recipient of this year's Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility is Rebecca Aviel, for The Boundary Claim's Caveat: Lawyers and Confidentiality Exceptionalism. The award will be presented at the Section Lunch of the AALS Section on Professional Responsibility, which will take place on Saturday, January 5, at 12:30 pm, at the Palace Cafe on Canal Street.

Get the molten chocolate dessert, Sam! [Alan Childress]

Fraidin on How We Talk About Child Welfare and the Lawyer's Role

Matthew I. Fraidin, a visiting associate professor at Georgetown Law, has posted to SSRN his 2012 essay, "Changing the Narrative of Child Welfare." Its abstract:

In child welfare, the difference we can make as lawyers for parents, children, and the state, and as judges, is to prevent children from entering foster care unnecessarily. And we can end a child’s stay in foster care as quickly as possible. To do that, we have to fight against a powerful narrative of child welfare and against the accepted “top-down” paradigm of legal services.

In this essay, Professor Fraidin suggests that we can achieve our goals of limiting entries to foster care and speeding exits from it by looking for the strengths of the people involved in our cases, rather than their weaknesses. We can look for what they can do, rather than what they can’t. We can focus on their abilities, not the shortcomings over which we often obsess — like drug addiction, impatience, illiteracy, poverty. We can start from a premise that families involved with child welfare are bundles of assets, rather than collections of problems. If we can do all this, we can help families build, rather than watch them fall.

[Alan Childress]

Weisselberg and Li on the White Collar Defense Bar in BigLaw and How it Has Changed

Charles Weisselberg and Su Li (Cal., Berkeley Law [and its great Center for Study of Law & Society]) have posted to SSRN their study of the transformation of the white collar defense bar. Its title is Big Law's Sixth Amendment: The Rise of Corporate White-Collar Practices in Large U.S. Law Firms and its abtract is:

Over the last three decades, corporate white-collar criminal defense and investigations practices have become established within the nation’s largest law firms. It did not used to be this way. White-collar work was not considered a legal specialty. And, historically, lawyers in the leading civil firms avoided criminal matters. But several developments occurred at once: firms grew dramatically, the norms within the firms changed, and new federal crimes and prosecution policies created enormous business opportunities for the large firms. Using a unique data set, this Article profiles the Big Law partners now in the white-collar practice area, most of whom are male former federal prosecutors. With additional data and a case study, the Article explores the movement of partners from government and from other firms, the profitability of corporate white-collar work, and the prosecution policies that facilitate and are in turn affected by the growth of this lucrative practice within Big Law. These developments have important implications for the prosecution function, the wider criminal defense bar, the law firms, and women in public and private white-collar practices.

[Alan Childress]

Gallagher on the IP Bar, its Practices, and the Effect on Real Copyright and Trademark Law

You may not catch it from the title, but William T. Gallagher's (Golden Gate U. Law) new paper posted to SSRN is firmly about the legal profession, the bar, and the practice of IP law. Using an empirical/interviewing methodology, Gallagher explores the construction of copyright/trademark law through day-to-day practice, cease and desist letters, and the stuff that never makes it to courts. A teacher of both Professional Responsibility/lawyer regulation as well as IP law, he has spent years collecting the data for this revealing study. His abstract:

    In recent years, as Congress has created new intellectual property (IP) rights and courts have often interpreted those rights broadly, legal scholars have frequently decried the expanded scope of protection afforded IP owners in most substantive areas of IP law. According to this critique, the over-expansion of IP rights throughout the past two decades harms competition, chills free speech, and diminishes the public domain as increasingly broad areas of social life are brought within the scope of strong IP protection. While this over-expansion theory reflects an important — indeed, foundational — policy debate concerning the proper balance between IP owners’ rights and the public’s rights of access to the information, ideas, and expressions that IP protects, it is incomplete precisely because it focuses largely on what Congress or the courts do. In reality, most enforcement of IP rights takes place not in court, but in the everyday practices of IP owners and their lawyers. “Cease and desist” letters, phone calls, and negotiations with alleged infringers constitute the bulk of IP enforcement efforts in trademark and copyright practice. To be sure, these efforts take place in the “shadow” of IP law and are therefore influenced by it. But it is in these everyday practices — and not in trial or appellate courts — that most IP rights are asserted, resisted, and negotiated. Thus, if we want to know whether IP rights are over-enforced or over-extended, we need to know how, why, and to what effect these rights are exercised in daily life. To date, however, IP scholarship has focused virtually no attention on this critical arena of everyday practice. Most IP scholarship is primarily doctrinal, focusing on published appellate cases. Even the growing empirical scholarship on IP focuses largely on published or, at least, filed cases. As in every other area of civil justice, however, most IP disputes do not result in litigation, and most litigation settles well before trial. Certainly, published appellate decisions and even filed cases represent only a small percentage of IP disputes. Thus, in order to more fully understand whether IP rights affect competition, chill free speech, diminish the public domain, or impede creativity, it is necessary to explore how IP claims are made and resolved in private negotiation rather than in litigation, which is the focus of this Article. It presents findings from a qualitative empirical study of the trademark and copyright disputing process outside of court, based on original data derived from semi-structured interviews with experienced IP attorneys who advise clients on how to enforce their rights. This research is one of the first studies to examine how trademark and copyright claims are actually enforced in practice.

[Alan Childress]

Hatfield on the History of Tax Lawyer Ethics

Michael Hatfield of Texas Tech has published to SSRN his study of the tax legal profession, in a historical context: "Legal Ethics and Federal Taxes, 1945-1965:  Patriotism, Duties and Advice." Its abstract:

Legal Ethics and Federal Taxes, 1945-1965: Patriotism, Duties and Advice provides a timely historical review of legal ethics and federal taxes. Focusing on the first two decades of the modern income tax (1945-1965), the Article reviews the ethics literature of the tax bar, which was mostly written by very prominent tax lawyers (a founder of Paul, Weiss; partners at Sullivan & Cromwell, Willkie Farr, etc.), tax professors (including the dean at Harvard Law School), and government officials (including key advisors to FDR, JFK, and LBJ). This seemingly forgotten literature provides a remarkable contrast to today’s anti-tax climate, especially given that the highest marginal individual tax rate during 1945-1965 was 94%. The writers of this period emphasized the patriotic duty to support the federal government by paying taxes, describing taxes, for example, as the price to maintain capitalism (Merle Miller) and a “blessing” (Erwin Griswold). Several stressed the ethical duty of lawyers to improve their clients’ respect for the tax system (Norris Darrell, e.g.). “Ethics” for these writers was not an issue of the ABA canons but rather a more general, philosophical reflection. For example, in 1949, the tax committee of the ABA issued a report on the importance of natural law jurisprudence in tax. In 1952, the discussion at the Tax Law Review banquet (which was nominally dedicated to discussing “Ethical Problems of Tax Practitioners”) developed into a debate over whether or not Americans were more degenerate then than in the past (Edmond Cahn) or merely more self-conscious (Thomas Tarleau). But the ethics writers were also concerned with specific issues that endure to this day, such as when to disclose an arguable but uncertain tax position – some (Randolph Paul, e.g.) arguing almost any position the government was likely to question should be disclosed, others (Boris Bittker, e.g.) arguing against disclosure so long as the position was reasonable. There was wide disagreement as to whether or not tax lawyers owed a special duty to the system, but wide agreement that this theoretical debate was nearly moot given that conservative tax advice was usually not only the most ethical but the most practical. This pragmatic attitude – emphasizing that good tax practice, good tax ethics, and good tax advice tended to converge – reflected the “real world” orientation of these professionally accomplished writers, even though, by today’s standards, many of their statements seem idealistic. The salvaging of this forgotten literature is timely not only in its relevance to contemporary debates, but also its relevance to the increasing historical research of the income tax as its 100th anniversary approaches.

[Alan Childress]

Michael Cassidy Wins Fred Zacharias Award

Breaking news shared by Touro Law Center's Samuel J. Levine, announcing the second recipient of this scholarship award in our field:

The winner of the second annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for
Scholarship in Professional Responsibility is Michael Cassidy, for Plea
Bargaining, Discovery and the Intractable Problem of Impeachment Disclosures.

The Prize will be presented at the Section Lunch of the AALS Section on
Professional Responsibility, which will take place on Friday, January 6,
2012, at 12:30 p.m., at American University Law School.

More on Prof. R. Michael Cassidy of Boston College here. His paper is on SSRN here.

A great way to remember Fred, who is missed. [Alan Childress]

Gallagher on Lawyer Roles and Ethics in IP Practice

Posted by Alan Childress

I received an interesting reprint yesterday in the mail, intersecting legal ethics and IP practice -- particularly discovery methods in the wake of Qualcomm -- using an empirical research approach and lawyer interviews. William Gallagher (law, Golden Gate U) published in John Marshall's IP law review (also on SSRN) an article entitled IP Legal Ethics in the Everyday Practice of Law: An Empirical Perspective on Patent Litigators. Its abstract:

This article presents preliminary findings from a qualitative empirical study of patent litigators. Part of a larger and ongoing project studying intellectual property lawyers in patent, trademark, and copyright enforcement and litigation actions, this article focuses on ethical decision-making by patent litigators in the pretrial discovery process. The article is based on data from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with fifty-five patent litigators and from a detailed case study of the infamous Qualcomm patent sanctions case. The article critically examines how patent litigators perceive of and respond to ethical issues that arise in the discovery process. It also analyzes the structural and cultural factors that influence ethical decision-making, as patent litigators navigate the multiple and often conflicting demands made throughout the discovery process by clients, firms, colleagues, and ethical rules. A significant finding from this study is that the threat of Qualcomm-like discovery sanctions is largely irrelevant to the everyday practice of patent litigators and has had little effect on their ethical decision-making. To-date there are few empirical studies of intellectual property lawyers or of legal ethics “in action.” This study begins to fill that gap.