As lawyers, we are charged with recognizing many lines of demarcation, such as those between what is legal and illegal, ethical and unethical, prudent and imprudent. Not unlike clergy, we are presumed to have the knowledge, experience and inner compasses that inform us instantly to discern right from wrong, permissible from prohibited, and risky from risk-free. Consequently, clients call on lawyers to learn what they can and cannot do regarding their businesses, their families and their property. Whether they are launching a commercial endeavor, redefining a familial situation or creating a relationship between parties, our clients come to us to learn where the lines are. Usually, clients want to walk as closely as possible to that line, or even to bend the line. When they cross such a line, clients come to us for advice and defense. They need us to keep them or get them out of trouble, to rework their documents or modify their relationships so as to put them in the right. They need us to shine a bright light on the line and to show them how to walk the edge. Attorneys don’t fear those precarious lines of demarcation; rather, we take pride in negotiating the edgiest paths for our clients. We would do well to take fewer such risks for ourselves.
In a practice that advises and defends only lawyers and those who would be lawyers, my clients are surprisingly little different from lay clients. Despite years of law school, decades of experience and centuries of precedent, some attorneys still don’t know, or perhaps have forgotten, where the lines are and how to walk them. They need help structuring their own professional relationships and managing their practices to comport with the letter and spirit of the law, keeping their lawyerly activities safely within the boundaries set by the Rules of Professional Conduct—that small collection of rules that is the crown jewel of American jurisprudence.
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