Expertise and specialization have become essential to modern professional success, and most attorneys today have a specialty. Even lawyers who are generalists are usually experts in some field of law. On top of that, however, the Supreme Court expects that all attorneys have expertise in yet another field—legal ethics.

Their reasoning is hard to challenge: First, legal ethics is central to our existence. We need rules which govern our conduct. Next, the entire body of required ethics information is finite and manageable. Almost everything we need to know is codified in the Rules of Professional Conduct and the Rules of Court. Moreover, we have studied it all before.  We all took at least one law school course in professional responsibility, we passed a professional responsibility exam, and we take mandatory CLE. Nevertheless, we lawyers often violate rules we have forgotten or never even knew.

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