It appears somehow that life and practice left me with nothing to post for more than a week now. If I have any readers left, today’s post will be a relatively quick one.
I managed to write a couple ofposts now about one topic that was covered at the APRL mid-year meeting in Las Vegas earlier this year. In keeping with the spirit of not having things that happen in Vegas stay in Vegas this time around, Jayne Reardon a Chicago lawyer who participated in a different panel discussion has put out a new post about the topic of law firm (or entity) regulation over at the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism blog, 2Civility. You can read it here.
Now, I do not disagree that aspects of the trend of entity regulation that is taking place with respect to law firms in other countries may have some utility here in the states IF we were to remove barriers to how lawyers and people without law licenses could work together to practice law. Until that happens, it simply isn’t something that is helpful to addressing actual issues. And particularly not if the focus is on discipline.
As the article does acknowledge, the disciplinary rules already provide a means for having members of management and partners in law firms on the hook for discipline in certain circumstances through RPC 5.1. I consider that tool to be more than enough regulation from the disciplinary side of things for many of the examples that Jayne offers in her article to be addressed.
That being said, I absolutely agree that if we could start to see movement toward a more proactive system — like the PMBR course that Jayne discusses that is being implemented in Illinois – then I’d be all for exploring how to move toward a regulatory framework that looks more toward regulation of the entities in which many lawyers practice than merely targeting individual attorneys for discipline.
But, we don’t. We live in a world in which individual attorneys get targeted for discipline. So, today, I’d suggest we all take some time to listen to what this recently disbarred attorney has to say today.