Concept
The Competence Standard
Maintaining competence
The Duty of Competence
The Competence Standard
Rule 1.1 packs the lawyer's most basic duty into two sentences. The first commands: a lawyer shall provide competent representation to a client. The second defines the term: competent representation requires the legal knowledge, skill, thoroughness, and preparation reasonably necessary for the representation.1 Knowledge and skill describe what the lawyer can do, and thoroughness and preparation describe the effort the lawyer invests. Other rules fill in particular parts of the obligation. Rule 3.1 forbids frivolous proceedings, Rule 3.2 requires reasonable efforts to expedite litigation consistent with the client's interests, and Rule 4.1 requires truthfulness in statements to others.2
Clients cannot adequately evaluate the quality of legal service, so they must trust the lawyer they consult. The profession's claim to exclusive licensing rests on the assumption that it is self-regulating, organized to assure the public and the courts that its members are competent and do not violate their clients' trust.3 Rule 1.1 puts that assurance to work as a floor of conduct below which the profession and the courts will discipline a lawyer.4 A client with a routine matter can no more check the work than a client with a contested one, so the floor applies to both.
The closing qualifier, "reasonably necessary for the representation," ties every ingredient of competence to the matter at hand.5 The test is objective: the question is what this representation reasonably requires, so a lawyer's sincere belief that a quick search was enough settles nothing. The test is also matter-specific, because what is reasonably necessary varies with the task. An uncontested name change calls for far less knowledge and preparation than a multi-party securities action, and the same lawyer may be fully competent in the first and fall short in the second.
The qualifier also explains what the rule leaves out. It sets no requirement of specialization, prior experience, or a fixed body of knowledge mastered before a client is accepted. A rigid credential rule would confine lawyers to narrow fields, and a client with an unusual problem might find no one permitted to help. A lawyer therefore need not know everything at the outset, and the sections that follow show how a lawyer closes the gaps that remain.
Some capacities are necessary in every matter, whatever its subject, because no matter can be handled without them. The profession's own catalog of fundamental lawyering skills includes problem solving, legal analysis and reasoning, legal research, factual investigation, and communication, both oral and written.6 These skills form a floor beneath the matter-specific standard. A lawyer can acquire knowledge of an unfamiliar field, but a lawyer who lacks the skills needed to acquire it cannot be competent in any matter.
That distinction is the one an exam stem about unfamiliar work usually tests. A gap in knowledge of the substantive law can be closed by study. A gap in basic skill cannot, because those skills are what make the study possible.
The District of Columbia shows how a jurisdiction can build on the Model Rule. Its Rule 1.1 repeats the Model Rule's two sentences as paragraph (a) and adds paragraph (b), which requires a lawyer to serve a client with skill and care commensurate with that generally afforded to clients by other lawyers in similar matters.7 That addition measures competence against what peers actually do in comparable matters. Battle v. Thornton, a D.C. case testing whether criminal defense lawyers had met the standard of care, quotes the rule together with the D.C. comment stating that a lawyer need not necessarily have special training or prior experience to handle legal problems of an unfamiliar type.8 The court rejected the former clients' effort to define the standard of care by a Medicaid fraud specialty instead of the general practice of criminal law, which fits the point that competence does not demand specialization. It was inclined to let them put on expert testimony telling the jury how a competent lawyer should have conducted a Medicaid fraud defense.9 The peer-practice paragraph is a D.C. feature, and the Model Rule text contains nothing like it.