Also known as: professional responsibilities · legal ethics · attorney ethics
Written by attorneys — see sources below.
The body of ethical rules and standards that govern the conduct of lawyers in their professional activities. These rules impose a duty to provide legal services to those unable to pay.
Perry Pratt, a solo practitioner, devotes sixty hours each year to representing low-income tenants facing eviction without charging any fee. Because he meets the aspirational target of fifty hours of uncompensated legal work for persons of limited means, his conduct satisfies the professional responsibility obligation to serve those unable to pay.
Phoenix Technologies, a legal services provider, refuses to follow a county bar's minimum fee schedule for title examinations. The bar's enforcement effort is struck down because the schedule violates the professional responsibility rules requiring lawyers to avoid anticompetitive practices that harm access to legal services.
In 1971 petitioners, husband and wife, contracted to buy a home in Fairfax County, Virginia. The financing agency required them to secure title insurance, which in turn required a title examination that only a member of the Virginia State Bar could legally perform. Petitioners contacted a lawyer who quoted them the precise fee suggested in a minimum-fee schedule published by respondent Fairfax County Bar Association, amounting to one percent of the value of the property. They then sent letters to thirty-six other Fairfax County lawyers requesting their fees for the title examination. Nineteen replied, and none indicated that he would charge less than the rate fixed by the schedule. The fee schedule is a list of recommended minimum prices for common legal services. The County Bar is a purely voluntary association of attorneys with no formal power to enforce the schedule. Respondent Virginia State Bar is the administrative agency through which the Virginia Supreme Court regulates the practice of law, and membership is required to practice in the state. The State Bar published reports condoning fee schedules. It issued ethical opinions indicating that evidence an attorney habitually charges less than the suggested minimum fee schedule adopted by his local bar association raises a presumption that such lawyer is guilty of misconduct. Because petitioners could not find a lawyer willing to charge a fee lower than the schedule dictated, they had their title examined by the lawyer they had first contacted. They then brought this class action against the State Bar and the County Bar alleging that the operation of the minimum-fee schedule as applied to fees for legal services relating to residential real estate transactions constitutes price fixing in violation of section 1 of the Sherman Act. After a trial solely on the issue of liability the district court held that the minimum-fee schedule violated the Sherman Act as to the County Bar but exempted the State Bar. The court of appeals reversed as to liability. The Supreme Court granted certiorari.
View casePedro Pacheco pleads guilty to a drug offense after his lawyer neglects to warn him that the conviction will trigger automatic removal proceedings. The conviction is later vacated because the lawyer's omission breached the professional responsibility duty to provide competent advice on the immigration consequences of the plea.
Jose Padilla, a native of Honduras, has been a lawful permanent resident of the United States for more than forty years and served in the U.S. Armed Forces during the Vietnam War. He faced criminal charges in Kentucky after being arrested for transporting a large amount of marijuana in his tractor-trailer. Before entering a guilty plea to the drug distribution charges, Padilla's counsel did not advise him that the conviction would trigger deportation proceedings. Counsel instead told him that he did not have to worry about his immigration status because he had lived in the country so long. Padilla relied on that advice when he pleaded guilty and later alleged that he would have insisted on going to trial if he had received accurate information. In postconviction proceedings Padilla claimed that his attorney's erroneous advice about deportation constituted ineffective assistance. The Supreme Court of Kentucky denied relief without holding an evidentiary hearing, treating deportation as a collateral consequence outside the protection of the Sixth Amendment. The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari to review whether federal law imposed on counsel an obligation to advise Padilla that his guilty plea would result in removal from the country.
View caseAfter Pearl Porter dies, federal prosecutors subpoena her former lawyer for notes of confidential conversations about a tax matter. The court upholds the privilege claim because professional responsibility rules require continued protection of client confidences even after the client's death.
In July 1993 Vincent W. Foster, Jr., then Deputy White House Counsel, met with attorney James Hamilton of the firm Swidler & Berlin to seek legal representation concerning possible congressional or other investigations of the 1993 dismissal of employees from the White House Travel Office. During the two-hour meeting Hamilton took three pages of handwritten notes, one of the first entries of which was the word "Privileged." Nine days later Foster committed suicide. In December 1995 a federal grand jury at the request of the Office of the Independent Counsel issued subpoenas to Hamilton and Swidler & Berlin for Hamilton's handwritten notes of the meeting with Foster. Petitioners filed a motion to quash the subpoenas. After examining the notes in camera the District Court concluded they were protected by both the attorney-client privilege and the work-product privilege and denied enforcement. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed. It recognized that most courts assume the privilege survives death but concluded that a balancing test should apply in the criminal context. The Court of Appeals also held that the notes were not protected by the work-product privilege. A dissenting judge would have affirmed the District Court's judgment protecting the notes under the attorney-client privilege. Petitioners sought review in the Supreme Court on both the attorney-client privilege and the work-product privilege. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in 1998.
View casePenelope Price is questioned at a police station for several hours without being told she may remain silent or consult counsel. Her later statements are suppressed because the interrogation violated professional responsibility standards requiring lawyers and officials to honor the right to legal advice during custodial questioning.
In March 1963 Ernesto Miranda was arrested at his home in Phoenix and taken to the police station where he was identified by the complaining witness. He was then questioned by two officers in Interrogation Room No. 2 for two hours. The officers did not advise him of any right to counsel. Miranda signed a typed confession that was introduced at his trial for kidnapping and rape. On October 14 1960 Michael Vignera was arrested in connection with a Brooklyn robbery. He was taken first to the 17th Detective Squad headquarters in Manhattan and later to the 66th Detective Squad. A detective questioned him for several hours without any advice concerning counsel. Vignera made an oral admission. He was then questioned by an assistant district attorney whose transcribed statement was also introduced at his trial for first-degree robbery. On March 20 1963 Carl Calvin Westover was arrested by Kansas City police as a suspect in two local robberies. Kansas City police interrogated Westover on the night of his arrest. The next day local officers interrogated him again throughout the morning. Westover was then turned over to FBI agents who questioned him for two to two-and-a-half hours about California robberies and obtained signed confessions. At the time the FBI agents began questioning Westover he had been in custody for over fourteen hours. On January 31 1963 Roy Allen Stewart was arrested at his home in connection with a series of purse-snatch robberies. During the next five days police interrogated Stewart on nine different occasions without any advice of rights. On the ninth session Stewart confessed. Transcripts of the interrogations were introduced at his trial for kidnapping rape and murder. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed Miranda's conviction. The New York courts affirmed Vignera's conviction. The Ninth Circuit affirmed Westover's conviction. The California Supreme Court reversed Stewart's conviction. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in the four cases and consolidated them for argument.
View caseYes. A lawyer who provides legal services in a state becomes subject to that state's disciplinary authority even if licensed elsewhere. The rule reaches conduct that occurs within the state's borders regardless of the lawyer's licensing jurisdiction.
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Law-related services fall under the rules when they are not distinct from the lawyer's legal practice or when the lawyer fails to take reasonable measures to inform recipients that the services are not legal services and lack client-lawyer protections.
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Every lawyer has a professional responsibility to provide legal services to those unable to pay and should aspire to render at least fifty hours of pro bono publico legal services each year, with a substantial majority devoted to persons of limited means without fee or expectation of fee.
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…the prosecutor but not to himself. This danger shrinks markedly in the police station where indeed the lawyer in fulfilling his professional responsibilities of necessity may become an obstacle to truthfinding. See infra , n. 12. The Court's summary citation of the Sixth Amendment cases here seems to me best described as "the domino method of…