Ed. note: Please welcome Renee Knake Jefferson back to the pages of Above the Law. Subscribe to her Substack, Legal Ethics Roundup, here.
Welcome to what captivates, haunts, inspires, and surprises me every week in the world of legal ethics.
Hello First Monday!
What is a “First Monday” edition? Every Monday here at the LER you receive a summary of the top ten legal ethics headlines. But, on the first Monday of the month, you get lots more — the headlines plus reading recommendations, legal ethics in pop culture, job postings, events, and other features. Enjoy!
Did you see the launch of NASA’s Artemis 2 last week? As a kid who watched the Challenger disaster live on a TV wheeled into my 6th grade math class, I was surprisingly emotional about the whole thing and it was inspiring to observe. The full “Pink Moon” was an added bonus, and we got a nice view of it from the ground in Austin.
Highlights from Last Week – Top Ten Headlines
#1 “Politicians Would Appoint NC Lawyer Discipline Board Under Proposed Reforms.” From The News & Observer: “North Carolina’s system for investigating and disciplining lawyers would be overhauled under recommendations formally approved on Wednesday by a legislative committee. The recommendations, crafted by the State Bar Grievance Review Committee, would allow elected Republicans to appoint a majority of the members of the Disciplinary Hearing Commission, which decides whether and how to punish lawyers accused of ethical violations. Currently, those appointments are mostly made by the State Bar.” Read more here.
#2 AI Ethics for Lawyers. Two headlines for #2. First, from the ABA Journal: “Sanctions Ramping Up in Cases Involving AI Hallucinations.” — “The use of monetary sanctions against attorneys is seemingly on the rise as courts continue to address artificial intelligence-generated hallucinations in case documents.” Read more here. Second, from NPR: “Penalties Stack Up as AI Spreads Through the Legal System.” — “When it comes to using AI, it seems lawyers just can’t help themselves. Last year saw a rapid increase in court sanctions against attorneys for filing briefs containing errors generated by artificial intelligence tools. The most prominent case was that of the lawyers for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who were fined $3,000 each for filing briefs containing fictitious, AI-generated citations. But as a cautionary tale, it doesn’t seem to have had much effect. ‘Recently we had 10 cases from 10 different courts on a single day,’ says Damien Charlotin, a researcher at the business school HEC Paris who keeps a worldwide tally of instances of courts sanctioning people for using erroneous information generated by AI.” Read more and listen here.
#3 “Judges are Increasingly Using AI to Draft Rulings and Prepare for Hearings.” From The Washington Post: “A study found over 60 percent of surveyed judges have used AI in their work, even as some experts worry AI’s unreliability could compromise their authority.” Read more here (gift link).
#4 “Why a 98-Year-Old Federal Judge is Asking the Supreme Court for Her Job Back.” From NPR: “A federal judge who has been sidelined for three years over questions about her competency is asking the Supreme Court to throw her a lifeline. Judge Pauline Newman is 98 years old — and she wants a chance to hear cases again.” Read more and listen here.
#5 “Rude Texas Judge Facing More Trouble Amid Backlash Over Viral Video.” From TMZ: “The Texas judge going viral for all the wrong reasons has even more problems … he’s facing fines for missed filings with the Texas Ethics Commission.” Read more here. And from ABC News, watch one of the viral video clips here.
#6 “Syracuse Judge Disciplined for Refusing to Marry Same-Sex Couple, But She Will Keep Her Job.” From Syracuse.com: “A Syracuse City Court judge is being disciplined for refusing to officiate a same-sex marriage, actions that state officials said constitute serious misconduct and damaged trust in courts. The state Commission on Judicial Conduct announced its decision Monday that Judge Felicia Pitts-Davis should be censured for refusing to perform a scheduled courthouse wedding involving a same-sex couple on Nov. 16, 2024. A censure is a formal public reprimand, meaning Pitts-Davis is officially disciplined, but she keeps her position as judge.” Read more here.
#7 “Pam Bondi is Out as Attorney General — But the Damage She Has Done to the DOJ is Profound.” An op-ed from Richard Zitrin in the San Francisco Chronicle: “President Donald Trump has used the Department of Justice as if it were his own personal law firm. And Pam Bondi, in her zeal to help her boss, often seemed as if she were Trump’s personal lawyer, a role she once played, instead of the attorney general of the United States. … The priorities of the department have been upended. An open letter in October from 295 former employees put it plainly: ‘The Justice Department cannot uphold the rule of law when it carries out the President’s retribution campaign and protects his allies; violates court orders and evades due process requirements; directs attorneys to violate their ethical responsibilities; and fires its employees without notice or cause. It also cannot keep our country safe.’ … Bar complaints have been mounting against Trump’s entourage of Justice Department lawyers, and there’s no longer any internal ethics review. Still, Bondi proposed a new rule that would prevent state disciplinary authorities, who have clear authority to discipline federal lawyers, from investigating their conduct until the Justice Department does an internal — and ill-defined — review that could take years. This effort, too, will not succeed.” Read more here.
#8 “ABA Suit Over Trump’s Crackdown On Firms Moves Forward.” From Law360: “A D.C. federal judge has ruled the American Bar Association may pursue a challenge to the Trump administration’s series of executive orders targeting law firms.” Read more here.
#9 “Department of Justice Proposes Putting its Attorneys Above the Law.” An op-ed from Mark Recktenwald (former Chief Justice of the Hawaii Supreme Court) in The Hill: “One of the most effective checks on the Trump administration has been the federal courts. Not surprisingly, the administration is now trying to limit the courts’ ability to curb its excesses. It is doing so by trying to loosen the ethical controls on the Department of Justice lawyers who represent the government, making it easier for them to evade accountability and achieve the administration’s political goals.” Read more here.
#10 “Khalil Seeks Bove’s 3rd Circ. Recusal Over Ex-DOJ Roles.” From Law360: “Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident targeted for deportation, asked a Third Circuit judge, U.S. Circuit Judge Emil Bove, to recuse himself from en banc review of a decision allowing for Khalil’s detention, saying Wednesday that the judge was likely involved in decisions related to the case while at the Department of Justice.” Read more here.
Recommended Reading
So much great reading in legal ethics is out in the world right now. These four articles will keep you thinking long after you read them.
“Private Equity’s Law Firm Workaround: MSOs, Rule 5.4, and the Governance Gap” by Lev Breydo (William & Mary). From the abstract:
Private equity is moving aggressively into the legal profession—and its oversight infrastructure is wholly unprepared for this generational shift. To work around prohibitions against nonlawyer ownership, investors are repurposing the management services organization (MSO): a split-entity model in which attorneys retain the regulated practice, but investors acquire the firm’s operating platform.
This Essay provides the first systematic account of PE investment in law firms and the governance gap in which it is occurring—a vacuum unrecognized by the ABA, state bars, or the courts. The playbook is well-trodden, and the risks are not hypothetical. In just a few years, private equity fundamentally reshaped accounting through hundreds of transactions, with regulators scrambling only after the fact. Law is next. The MSO model rests on the fragile assumption that “business operations” and “legal practice” can be clearly and durably separated. Healthcare and accounting experience proves otherwise, with similar split-structures consistently exhibiting formality erosion and investor “control creep” through financial and operational pressure. Governance tensions also run deep: the structurally conflicted MSO board must build value while policing its own influence over the interlinked law firm. The problem is not the MSO per se, but the transactions proliferating in darkness without guardrails. This Essay proposes a three-part governance framework: (i) structural safeguards limiting MSOs to genuine support functions; (ii) independent directors and a board ethics committee; and (iii) ongoing compliance monitoring. The costs of the governance gap—compromised representation and reduced independence—will fall on the public, not investors. The window to act is closing fast.
“Legal Ethics As Confederate Memorial” by Pilar Margarita Hernández Escontrías (Seattle). From the abstract:
In this article, I excavate the white supremacist history of the legal ethics rules and demonstrate how the emergence of the 1908 Canons of Professional Conduct was a project of anti-Black solidarity between whites in the South and the North following Reconstruction. In Part I, I embark on the story of codification by beginning my historical inquiry in 1861 in Alabama, where Confederate major and New South Redeemer Thomas Goode Jones spent evenings during the war reading legal texts. He went on to study law with a southern secessionist and a pro-slavery Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. I then detail how he led the Alabama Bar Association in adopting the first code of attorney conduct in the nation.
In Part II, I detail Jones’ vision of federalism as seen through speeches, letters between him and President Theodore Roosevelt, and legal opinions. Exploring these archives expose Jones’ thinking and communication as a federal judicial officer, foregrounding his fervent belief in states’ rights and white supremacy. Not unlike other secessionists, Jones’ federalism sanctioned anti-Black violence in the name of states’ rights. This approach to federalism in his legal practice inspired his approach to leading the profession as it adopted its 1908 Canons.
In Part III, I argue that our legal ethics rules and the regime that followed is a Confederate memorial. In his attempt to unify the white North and South following the Civil War, Jones ethics rules hold the characteristics of Confederate memorials: they emerged in the violent context of post-Reconstruction United States, and their presence elides a racially violent history in service of purportedly neutral or colorblind principles of competence, honor, respect, and integrity, among other professional values. When understood in political economic context, legal ethics rules and the disciplinary regime associated with these rules are memorials to a violent, anti-Black past within our settler nation and within our profession. As Confederate memorials, they perpetuate the anti-Black solidarities that animated their promulgation in the first instance.
“Advice without Lawyers? Immigrants, Legal Deserts, and Reflections on Who Can Practice Law” by Jayanth K. Krishnan (Indiana). From the abstract:
The recent immigration surge in Minneapolis evoked deep anger and despair, not just within Minnesota but among many observers across the country. Indeed, the plight of immigrants suffering under such federal enforcement has a long history. Immigrants who face removal do not have a right to government-appointed counsel. For those in detention, their time behind bars can be extensive, and they are often placed in overcrowded and unclean holding cells, disconnected from family and other forms of community support. Today, millions of immigrants remain vulnerable, with their ability to access justice as unattainable as ever. Unfortunately, immigrants encounter particularly difficult circumstances in “legal desert” communities, where there are effectively no lawyers at all. Alternative nonlawyer advocates have emerged, however, filling the gap and offering valuable legal services. Yet bar associations and attorneys general in many states have responded by prohibiting such assistance on the basis that it constitutes the unauthorized practice of law. Adding weight to those who oppose nonlawyers is the Second Circuit, which in September 2025 ruled that the state of New York could forbid these workers from participating in the legal services space. The court emphasized consumer protection in its decision and found that the state’s regulations complied with an intermediate scrutiny analysis under the First Amendment. Other jurisdictions, though, have taken a different approach from the Second Circuit and embraced various nonlawyer programs.
This Article sides with those states that have welcomed nonlawyer entrepreneurialism by arguing for a tiered “Justice Advocate” framework. Under this appropriately regulated model, which would protect consumer interests, certified nonlawyers could provide narrowly defined legal assistance. This framework also more justly accommodates the free speech rights of nonlawyers and ultimately delivers greater access to legal services—especially for those immigrants who live in legal deserts.
“‘No Further Discussion Necessary’: Compliance As Professionalism In Legal Education” by Sarah Schendel (Suffolk). From the abstract:
Since 2009, the Virginia Board of Bar Examiners has published a formal dress code for bar-exam takers. For several years, it ended with a telling line: “Recognizing the high caliber of professionalism that has traditionally characterized the bar, the Board is confident that no further discussion of this topic will be necessary.” The sentence was eventually removed, but its intent and legacy remain, revealing how the legal profession often equates professionalism not with ethical judgment but with unquestioned compliance. This seemingly trivial example exposes something central about how lawyers are made. Legal education does more than teach doctrine; it socializes students into a professional identity built on hierarchy, restraint, and deference. From orientation to the bar exam, students are taught that composure signals competence, that neutrality means fairness, and that disagreement threatens professionalism. The result is a culture that prizes conformity over conscience.
Legal Ethics in Pop Culture — “Billboards and the Billable Hour: A lawyer’s take on a Netflix series about Las Vegas litigation”
From Adam Banner in the ABA Journal: “Every so often, a legal show comes along that makes me ask one important question: WTF am I watching? That’s roughly the experience of viewing Strip Law, the latest legal comedy on Netflix. The adult animated sitcom centers on a group of flamboyant attorneys who take on outrageous cases and market themselves with all the subtlety of a monster-truck rally and the restraint of a sleazy stand-up comedian. I approached the show with skepticism. After all, television lawyers usually fall somewhere between Atticus Finch’s saintly demeanor and Saul Goodman’s theatrical chaos. Strip Law plants its flag firmly in the latter territory—then replaces the flagpole with a neon billboard, pushes all the chips to the middle, and lights the poker table on fire in a way that only an animated comedy could. And honestly, I’m kind of a fan. Kind of.” Read more here. And watch the official trailer here.
Get Hired
Did you miss the 500+ job postings from previous weeks? Find them all here.
Conflicts Attorney, Lewis Brisbois — Las Vegas, NV. From the posting: ”This role is responsible for reviewing and analyzing conflicts check reports for new firm matters, lateral attorney hires, and legal support staff hires. The Conflicts Attorney will identify potential conflicts issues and work closely with firm attorneys and staff to resolve and clear conflicts of interest.” Learn more and apply here.
Ethics Attorney, General Services Administration — Washington DC. From the posting: ”Work with the Ethics Law Division on providing advice and opinions on complex matters related to the Standards of Ethical Conduct for Employees of the Executive Branch and the criminal conflict of interest statutes.” Salary starts at $108,173. Learn more and apply here.
Ethics Commission Advisory Attorney — Columbus, OH. From the posting: “Serves as a management level attorney providing legal counsel & advice to public officials, Chief Advisory Attorney, Executive Director, Commissioners on policy development and implementation relating to advisory functions of the Ethics Commission.” Learn more and apply here.
Litigation Counsel, Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission — Chicago. From the posting: ”The ARDC is currently seeking three full-time Litigation Counsel to join our dedicated litigation team in the Chicago office. Litigation counsel facilitate attorney compliance with the Rules of Professional Conduct and when necessary, prosecute formal disciplinary matters. Staff attorneys have a diverse and challenging caseload within the context of a fast-paced work environment, balancing the rights of attorneys and protecting the public and the courts. This is an exciting opportunity to engage in challenging and meaningful public service work while making a difference in the lives of fellow Illinoisans and advancing the ethical and competent practice of law.” Salary range $110,000-130,000. Learn more and apply here.
Unauthorized Practice of Law; UPL Counsel, State Bar of Michigan — Lansing, MI. From the posting: ”As UPL Counsel, you will manage and direct all aspects of the Bar’s Unauthorized Practice of Law program — from investigation and litigation to education and policy development” Salary range $80,000-110,000. Learn more and apply here.
Upcoming Ethics Events & Other Announcements ️
Did you miss an announcement from previous weeks? Find them all here.
April 13, 10-11AM Pacific. Stanford Law School Rhode Center on the Legal Profession. Lawyers’ Monopoly Webinar Series 2: Lessons from the Field: On-the-Ground Efforts to Effect Positive Regulatory Innovations. Learn more and register here.
April 16, 5-7PM Pacific. Gonzaga Law School Clarke Prize in Legal Ethics. Scott Cummings (UCLA) and I will be discussing “Good Faith and Public Trust in an Erosive Era.” Learn more and register here.
April 22-24. American Bar Association Spring 2026 National Legal Malpractice Conference, Coral Gables. Learn more and register here.
May 13, 10-11AM Pacific. Stanford Law School Rhode Center on the Legal Profession. Lawyers’ Monopoly Webinar Series 3: The Comparative Lens. Learn more and register here.
May 27-29. ABA 51st Conference on Professional Responsibility, UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center, Los Angeles. Learn more here.
May 29-30. ABA 41st National Forum on Client Protection, UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center, Los Angeles. Learn more here.
June 24, 10-11AM Pacific. Stanford Law School Rhode Center on the Legal Profession. Lawyers Monopoly Webinar Series #4: Charting the Future of Legal Services. Learn more and register here.
June 25-26. International Association of Legal Ethics Berlin Conference: “The Legal Professions in Times of Rule of Law and Democratic Backsliding.” Learn more here.
October 15-16. Complex Litigation Ethics Conference, UC Law San Francisco. The conference is the fourth annual event addressing Complex Litigation Ethics. It will bring together luminaries in the field—judges, scholars, lawyers, and others—to discuss a cutting-edge topic that is of critical importance to our justice system. Learn more here.
December 9-11. International Legal Ethics Conference, National University of Singapore, Faculty of Law. Learn more here.
Keep in Touch
- News tips? Announcements? Events? A job to post? Reading recommendations? Email [email protected] – but be sure to subscribe first, otherwise the email won’t be delivered.
- Do you have colleagues who care about legal ethics? Please share the Roundup with them. I’d love to see our community continue to grow!
Renee Knake Jefferson holds the endowed Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics and is a Professor of Law at the University of Houston. Check out more of her writing at the Legal Ethics Roundup. Find her on X (formerly Twitter) at @reneeknake or Bluesky at legalethics.bsky.social.
