I was privileged to be invited as a guest speaker at the August 6th, 2010 ABA Ethics 20/20 Commission public hearing on legal outsourcing San Francisco. The ABA also heard or received testimony from two other executives of legal process outsourcers (LPO). Click here for the speaker schedules and written testimony (PDF). In this post, I report on the status of the ABA ethics consideration process, my testimony, and my take-away from the hearing. I then share our view on what direction the ethics rules should take. The post closes with information on upcoming PLI conferences about legal outsourcing.
The ABA Process. The San Francisco hearing follows on from the ABA Section of International Law’s Public Forum on Offshore Outsourcing of Legal Services held in New York City on April 17, 2010. The purpose of that session was “to gather viewpoints for the Section’s Leadership Council, which is considering the formulation of policy recommendations to the larger ABA”. Integreon also testified at that meeting, as we reported in our blog post, ABA Reviewing Ethics Rules, Examining Legal Outsourcing. At that time, as noted in our post, the ABA had not decided what, if any action it should take regarding the ethics of legal outsourcing.
Since then, the ABA position seemed to shift a bit. Shortly before the San Francisco public hearing, a Section of International Law newsletter noted that the Section is “helping the larger ABA wrestle with whether existing ethical rules and regulatory structures adequately address the realities and challenges of a globalized 21st Century law practice… [the] efforts of the Section’s Task Force and the Ethics 20/20 Working Group have now merged [and] [t]he Working Group has developed proposed amendments to the Model Rules to address ethical issues arising from outsourcing.” So I went into the hearing assuming that the ABA will amend the Model Rules of Professional Conduct.
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Source: Integreon Blog
By: Mark Ross
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