Wednesday, September 7, 2022
[For a detailed description of the unique ProEthics approach to Legal Ethics CLE, please go here…]
Our latest exciting and acclaimed legal ethics seminars:
Ethics Wars: The Force of the Rules vs. The Dark Side
Description: In the legal galaxy not so far away, lawyers, the legal profession, law firms and even legal ethics scholars are facing rapidly developing events and meteoric developments that threaten to turn the universe of law practice as we know it inside out, and maybe worse. Bedrock assumptions about what constitutes ethical practice are being challenged. Technology and the reactions to the pandemic have exposed deep anachronisms in what have been regarded as settled legal ethics principles. It is a frightening time to be a lawyer, but, as compensation, it also makes for a great legal ethics CLE seminar.
Continuing their sometimes contentious debates that enlivened 2019’s “The Greatest Legal Ethics Seminar Ever Taught” and last year’s Zoomed “Your 2020 Legal Ethics Survival Kit,” legal ethics and lawyer Jack Marshall, representing the Rules of Professional Conduct and aspirational legal ethics, will cross lightsabers with litigator, law firm partner and malpractice expert John May, representing the intimidating Business of Law Empire, as well as the realities of legal practice that make ethical dilemmas a lot more complicated than typical seminar hypotheticals pretend. Among the many issues this interactive and dynamic three- hour seminar will explore:
- The dangerous politicizing of legal practice
- Unauthorized Practice of Law traps
- The business of law and the profession of law: can they continue to co-exist?
- The crucial battle over Rule 8.4g
- Conflicts of interest that can sneak up on you.
- When to violate confidentiality…or not
- How unenforced rules are placing clients at risk.
- Is fee-splitting with non-lawyers becoming “ethical”?
- Plus still unsettled legal ethics mysteries, and up-to-the-day developments
2-3 hours legal ethics CLE
Description: In this unique legal ethics program, award-winning stage and film actor Paul Morella, who has been portraying Darrow for nearly two decades reenacts some of the iconic lawyer’s most riveting courtroom moments while laying the foundation for an examination of the ethical issues raised by the great attorney’s long career, while ethicist, lawyer and Darrow historian Jack Marshall leads attendees in a lively and interactive examination of current and still controversial issues…(Click on title for more...)
2-3 hours legal ethics CLE
Description: Legal Ethics and Technology is a three-hour CLE ethics seminar that explores the rapidly proliferating ethical challenges of practicing law with and around technology, while recommending steps even the most tech-addled lawyers can and should take to protect clients and themselves. (Click on Title for more…)
The Legal Ethics Mine Field
Description: This up-to-date legal ethics seminar explores the special ethics threats facing today’s practitioners, in general and specialized practice and in organizational settings; how to avoid them, how to plan for them when they can’t be avoided, and how to react when specific dangerous situations appear.
The interactive course explores emerging and troubling legal ethics problems that mere rules cannot always solve, and the tension between being an ethical lawyer while remaining an ethical citizen and human being.
Like all ProEthics seminars, The Legal Ethics Mine Field includes up to the day discussions of new and recent legal ethics developments from across the nation.
The seminar has received top evaluations from both bar association and law firm participants, particularly for the lively discussions it has generated and its foray into unsettled areas of legal ethics and its interaction with business and society.
Some of the many issues explored:
- Conflicts created by the economy.
- The ethics of gaming the system.
- The reach of the legal ethics rules into non-legal activities.
- Lawyer whistleblowing and the limits of loyalty.
- “Who is the client?”dilemmas
- Perils of the technology J-curve.
…and more.
The Legal Ethics Spectrum
Description: With 50 states plus the District of Columbia attempting to deal with new and evolving ethical dilemmas, lawyers face an ever-growing spectrum of ethics rules, opinions and interpretations. The ethics rules around the country share a common ancestor and often look remarkably similar – but their differences pose professional perils for lawyers who don’t learn how to recognize and interpret their sometimes less-than-apparent variations and nuances. The problem is particularly acute for the many lawyers who maintain bar licenses in multiple jurisdictions.
The Legal Ethics Spectrum hones ethical problem-solving skills and catches up with new legal ethics developments of importance, constantly updated to within days of the course. Using hypothetical problems based on real cases and insights from current ethics commentary and trends, this fast-paced seminar is challenging and engaging, covering these topics and more:
- Increasing clash between business realities and professional ideals
- Client contact with adverse parties
- Duty to protect new secrets of former clients
- Transactional ethics dilemmas
- Out-of-jurisdiction practice
- Billing and retainer letters issues
- Ethics rules that don’t say what everyone thinks they do
…and more.
[Read More…]
In addition, ProEthics has customized special versions of The Legal Ethics Spectrum for non profit counsel, government attorneys, and corporate lawyers.
Plus…
New Edition ! The most popular legal ethics program in the ProEthics repertoire!
Ethics Chess 2022
Description: Ethics Chess is an entertaining and field-tested program that provides real tools and strategies to help the practicing attorney avoid ethics problems.
As ethics rules become more complex, it is increasingly apparent that the objective of any prudent lawyer must be to avoid pre-unethical conditions. You must recognize them and learn to take steps to avoid them several moves ahead. You need to be proficient at Ethics Chess.
This seminar tests the attorney’s ethical chess skills while demonstrating some useful new moves. This challenging, current, informative, and quickly paced session is a key to thinking as an ethical attorney must think, for his survival and that of his clients.
Among the topics addressed, and the useful “moves” described… [Read More…]
Also, still being updated regularly and as effective as ever….
Ethics Acceleration: Keeping up with Legal Ethics and the Changing Culture of Right and Wrong
[2 or 3 hours of CLE credit; also can include professionalism, civility, anti-bias and diversity as needed.]
Description:No longer can attorneys rely on the ethical principles they learned in law school or as first year associates, for the landscape of professional ethics is changing rapidly. Foreign practice, public scrutiny, high-profile cases, rule revisions, and technology are just a few of the factors that are challenging lawyers to refurbish and retro-fit their ethical assumptions.
Ethics Acceleration is a wide-ranging and challenging three hour CLE ethics seminar. Using a mixture of lecture and interactive hypotheticals, the seminar will explore many issues coming into sharp focus in 2019, among them…[Read More…]
and…
Ethics Quest
(Updated to 11/21)
One of ProEthics’ most popular three-hour legal ethics seminar, Ethics Quest covers some areas of legal ethics that the Rules never anticipated, along with some traditional minefields, as well as cutting edge legal ethics technology problems, such as best practices—if there are best practices, in the use of iphones, apps, technology user agreements and more. The new, updated 2015 version explores some tectonic upheavals in the law of conflicts of interest, as well as social media perils for lawyers that nobody saw coming and the legal ethics applications of the Supreme Court’s dilemma in King v. Burwell
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Ethics Safari: Surviving in the Legal Ethics Jungle
Description: Despite constant professional rules revisions and ongoing adjustments, the gray areas of ethical legal practice remain and even expand, causing understandable confusion among attorneys, clients and ethics committees. New technologies, new tactics, even new conflicts have begun to emerge, and the profession is scrambling to set its ethical bearings. More than ever, it is a jungle out there, and some traditional assumptions about the right way to practice law may not apply.
They may even be dangerous.
Ethics Safari examines these new issues, using actual experiences of attorneys across the nation… [Read More]
The Virtuous Lawyer’s Ethics Challenge,
Description: The key to ethical practice is not in knowing the rules, or even in having reliable ethical instincts. It is a well-developed ability to spot and analyze ethical problems, dilemmas and traps before they occur, knowing how to mitigate them when they do occur, and navigating through them when they threaten to do real harm. The best way to develop this ability, short of being engulfed by actual ethical challenges, is to practice the legal ethics decision-making process.
In The Virtuous Lawyer’s Ethics Challenge, that is what participants do. After a brief overview of methods, developments and tools by facilitator/presenter Jack Marshall, participants break into decision groups of 5-9 members. For 30 minutes, they examine a complex scenario, based on actual cases, raising multiple ethics issues. They then report their conclusions and recommendations to the group, which takes part in a spirited debate. The presenter supplements the discussion with relevant Rules, legal ethics opinions, and other useful information. [Read more…]
Completely Revised and Updated!
The Virtuous Lawyer’s Grand Tour
Description: Legal ethics is determined in places distant from the rules of any one jurisdiction, with almost daily developments that appear in new rules interpretations, court decisions, and legal ethics opinions across the country. It has been a significant and perplexing 12 months for legal ethics, with schisms of principle and language between the ABA and major jurisdictions, rule overhauls in California and elsewhere, and, as usual, New York, Florida, D.C. and other adventurous jurisdictions charting their own paths through the thickets of controversy. Technology continued to create new ethical demands. Lawyers wrestled with how to meet professional obligations while avoiding becoming a part of corporate fraud. Prosecutors and government attorneys encountered ethical challenges that the rules barely address. The last 12 months ended with more ethical gray areas than it began with, leaving problems that lawyers ignore at their peril.
Constantly updated and interactive, The Virtuous Lawyer’s Grand Tour takes attorneys on a wild and revealing tour of the most recent critical developments and controversies, from surprising discipline rulings and non-rulings…[Read more]
Plus these popular, updated ProEthics classics…
Zeal or No Zeal [2-3 hours]: Tracks the evolution of zeal as a legal ethics standard through the various versions of the rules, with fascinating hypotheticals—based on actual cases—where attorneys employed too much zeal, no enough, or just the right amount under difficult circumstances.
The Mind of the Virtuous Lawyer [2-3 hours]: Topics include pre-trial publicity, pro se clients, reporting misconduct, lawyer as witness, negotiation, tape-recording, inadvertent disclosure and more.
Secrets of the Virtuous Lawyer [2-3 hours]: Topics include adversary errors, gifts, unrepresented parties, the imprudent client, conflict of issues, avoiding pre-unethical conditions, professionalism, the disabled client, supervising attorneys and more.
Resisting the Dark Side [2-3 hours]: Topics include billing practices, negotiation, confidentiality, client communications, conflict of interest, fairness to the court and counsel, litigation “extortion,”coercive tactics, taint shopping and more.
Legal Practice Specialty Series
Seminars Designed For the Unique Ethics Issues Facing Specific Practice Areas
[90 minute to 3 Hour Legal Ethics CLE]
- Ethics and the Government Lawyer: Tools, principles and current ethics issues in government practice. Presented yearly for the D,C. Bar since 1999, and in various versions for the SEC, FDIC, FERC, FEMA, The U.S. Department of the Treasury, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Commerce
- The Virtuous Municipal Attorney: Staying ethical in the clash of politics and legal representation; tools and hypotheticals. Presented for national associations and individual municipalities.
- Too Many Hats: The Ethical Challenges of Corporate Counsel Ethical considerations and pitfalls for corporate and organization counsel. Presented for numerous corporate legal departments and national associations.
- The Virtuous Litigator: Litigation ethics dilemmas. Previously presented for the American Bar Association, The D.C. Bar, major law firms.
- Advanced Real Estate Practice Ethics: Principles and problems is real estate practice legal ethics. Previously presented for Virginia CLE, major law firms.
- Secrets of the Virtuous I.P. Lawyer: The complex legal ethics dilemmas of trademarks, patents and copyrights. Previously presented for Virginia CLE and major law firms.
- The Mind of the Virtuous Employment Lawyer: Ethics issues peculiar to the practice of employment law. Previously presented for Virginia CLE.
- The Virtuous Bankruptcy Lawyer: Ethics issues for bankruptcy specialists. Presented for a major law firm.
- Also: ProEthics has presented seminars in the following specialty areas:
Administrative law
Admiralty
Asset management
Criminal prosecution
Energy law
Family law
Federal claims
Government contracts
Immigration
Insurance practice
Mediation
Negotiation
Personal Injury law
Pro Se representation
Public interest law
Regulation
Technology