Richard Zitrin on Regulating the Behavior of Lawyers in Mass Individual Representations

Professor Richard Zitrin (UC Hastings) has posted to SSRN his article, Regulating the Behavior of Lawyers in Mass Individual Representations: A Call for Reform, 3 St. Mary’s J. on Legal Malpractice & Ethics 86 (2013).  Here's the abstract:

Cases in which lawyers represent large numbers of individual plaintiffs are increasingly common. While these cases have some of the indicia of class actions, they are not class actions, usually because there are no common damages, but rather individual representations on a mass scale. Current ethics rules do not provide adequate guidance for even the most ethical lawyers. The absence of sufficiently flexible, practical ethical rules has become an open invitation for less-ethical attorneys to abuse, often severely, the mass-representation framework by abrogating individual clients’ rights. These problems can be abated if the ethics rules offered better practical solutions to the mass-representation problem. It is necessary to reform the current rules, but only with a solution that is both practical and attainable, and with changes that maintain the core ethical and fiduciary duties owed by lawyers to their individual clients, including loyalty, candor, and independent professional advice.

BGS