Ethics in Advocacy: Instinct, Insight, and Competing Obligations

Join Proskauer’s Professional Responsibility Counsel J. Charles Mokriski as he provides an analysis of four frequent examples of ethical or professional responsibility situations arising in litigation practice.

Using hypothetical sets of facts, Charles discusses applicable rules of professional conduct, relevant ethics opinions and case law, as well as the evolution of various outcomes across different jurisdictions and time frames.

Learning Objectives:

I.     Examine how ethics analysis has changed over the years with the transformation of aspirational and value centric “legal ethics” into the black letter rule-based regime of “professional responsibility”

II.    Grasp core principles and values that have been maintained, sometimes with the gratuitous support of hoary clichés, like “the appearance of impropriety,” and its colloquial brother, “the smell test”

III.   Effectively address practical problems and real life issues by focusing on the policy objectives ethics rules and the values they are designed to advance

This course originally appeared as a part of our December 2015 Bridge the Gap Event.