The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.

Lawyers and Clients: Critical Issues in Interviewing and Counseling examines practical and theoretical challenges lawyers face with clients. Each chapter explores a critical issue in interviewing and counseling, such as developing connection across difference, dealing with atypical clients, and using engaged client-centered counseling. Ellmann, Dinerstein, Gunning, Kruse, and Shelleck investigate these issues primarily through detailed analysis of lawyer-client conversations, which invite the reader to consider and critique the lawyer's choices. A key theme is "engaged client-centered lawyering," which emphasizes the importance of client choice and the impact of lawyers on clients, and affirms lawyers' ability to achieve wise engagement with clients.

This book is a new primary text for use in clinical, externship, legal writing, interviewing, negotiation, counseling, trial/appellate advocacy, and doctrinal courses. This text centers narrative theory as an effective way to teach law school courses and to practice the full range of lawyering skills. Using multimedia examples, as well as exercises drawn from actual lawyering situations, the book describes, explores, and analyzes the interrelationship between narrative and lawyering. The book addresses the broad spectrum of skills and practice areas and fora that the profession increasingly demands. The book contributes to the growing literature on professional identity formation with updated chapters on critical lawyering, anti-racism, and cultural humility, and expanded chapters on trial and other forms of oral advocacy. This is a comprehensive book for using narrative, stories, and storytelling to develop more fully and effectively as a lawyer. The book provides the theory and information for planning for, conducting, and reflecting on various lawyering activities. In addition, the authors make the teaching relatable and transferable to a variety of contexts by using concrete examples drawn from their own extensive practice, writing, and teaching using lawyering and narrative.

The legal industry has long been risk averse, but when it comes to adapting to the experience-driven world created by companies like Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb, adherence to the old status quo could be the death knell for today's law firms. In The Client-Centered Law Firm, Clio cofounder Jack Newton offers a clear-eyed and timely look at how providing a client-centered experience and running an efficient, profitable law firm aren't opposing ideas. With this approach, they drive each other. Covering the what, why, and how of running a client-centered practice, with examples from law firms leading this revolution as well as practical strategies for implementation, The Client-Centered Law Firm is a rallying call to unlock the enormous latent demand in the legal market by providing client-centered experiences, improving internal processes, and raising the bottom line.

Lawyers know that client counseling can be the most challenging part of legal practice. Clients question and often resist the complexities and uncertainties inherent in law and legal process. Honest advice from the lawyer can make a client doubt his or her allegiance and zeal. Client backlash may be directed at the lawyer who communicates bad news. Thus, the lawyer may feel torn between the obligation to clearly inform a client about weaknesses in legal positions and fear of damaging the client relationship. Too often, the lawyer struggles to counsel a particularly difficult client, but to no avail. Client Science is written to provide insight and advice to lawyers on how to more effectively communicate with their clients with regard to legal realities and difficult decisions. It will help lawyers with the always-difficult task of delivering "bad news," which will result in better-informed and thus more satisfied clients. The book explains applicable social science research and insights and translates them into plain language relevant to legal practice and client counseling. Marjorie Corman Aaron offers specific suggestions related to a lawyer's ordering, timing, phrasing, and type of explanation, as well as style adjustments for the lawyer's voice, gesture, and body position, all to impact client counseling and to improve the lawyer-client relationship.

Each year more than 2 million Americans get divorced, and most of them use a lawyer. In closed-door conversations between lawyers and their clients strategy is planned, tactics are devised, and the emotional climate of the divorce is established. Do lawyers contribute to the pain and emotional difficulty of divorce by escalating demands and encouraging unreasonable behavior? Do they take advantage of clients at a time of emotional difficulty? Can and should clients trust their lawyers to look out for their welfare and advance their long-term interests? Austin Sarat and William L. F. Felstiner's new book, based on a pioneering and intensive study of actual conferences between divorce lawyers and their clients, provides an unprecedented behind-the-scenes description of the lawyer-client relationship, and calls into question much of the conventional wisdom about what divorce lawyers actually do. Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients suggests that most divorces are marked less by a pattern of aggressive advocacy than by one of inaction and drift. It uncovers reasons why lawyers find divorce practice frustrating and difficult and why clients frequently feel dissatisfied with their lawyers. This new work provides a unique perspective on the dynamics of professionalism. It charts the complex and shifting ways lawyers and clients "negotiate" their relationship as they work out the strategy and tactics of divorce. Sarat and Felstiner show how both lawyers and clients are able to draw on resources of power to set the agenda of their interaction, while neither one is fully in charge. Rather, power shifts between the two parties; where it is achieved, power is found in the ability to have one's understandings of the social and legal worlds of divorce accepted. Power then works through the creation of shared meanings. Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients examines the effort to create such shared meanings about the nature of marriage and why marriages fail, the operation of the legal process, and the best way to bring divorces to closure. It will be fascinating reading for anyone who is going through a divorce, or has gone through one, as well as for lawyers, judges, and scholars of law and society.

Attracting and retaining more clientsJob number one in every law firm is to attract and retain more clients. But how do you go about that challenging task? How do you know the marketing work in which you are investing scarce hours and dollars will actually pay off?David V. Lorenzo's Client Attraction Secrets provides a practice-proven roadmap to increasing law firm revenue without increasing your hours. His techniques might even allow you to shorten your workweek.Your results will depend on how enthusiastically and creatively you implement Mr. Lorenzo's suggestions, but know beforehand that the techniques detailed have worked for a wide variety of lawyers, in all types of practices, in good economic times and bad.Mr. Lorenzo has helped attorneys in ambitious solo practices, mid-sized firms, and multi-national behemoths. But what he most enjoys is helping lawyers build lifestyle-friendly niche practices that generate a comfortable income while permitting a healthy working/living balance.His book explains how he does it.