Regulation of Unethical Billing Practices: Progress and Prospects

During the last ten years billing fraud by lawyers has been recognized as a serious problem that undermines clients\u27 trust of lawyers and the reputation of the profession as a whole. It used to be thought that lawyers who wanted to steal their clients\u27 money would just take money out of the trust account. In recent years it has become clear that dishonest lawyers\u27 methods of misappropriation are far more diverse than that. The focus of this paper is on billing misconduct by lawyers who contract with their clients to bill by the hour. I will not talk about lawyers who borrow from their trust accounts or manipulate contingent fees

Teaching Ethics In and Outside of Law Schools: What Works and What Doesn’t

No matter the setting or the audience, certain approaches are more likely than others to engage the students in learning the relevant law and exploring the array of dilemmas that lawyers encounter in practice. Some methods are more likely than others to help students to increase their ability to recognize ethical dilemmas and to understand the institutional dynamics and economic pressures that lead some lawyers to rationalize unethical conduct. On the other hand, some approaches to teaching ethics are almost certain to fail, to produce boredom, animosity, cynicism or alienation among participants. What follows is a short inventory of some ethics teaching methods that work, and some that tend to fail, with brief discussion of why each may succeed or fail