For the past year and a half, the ABA’s Ethics 20/20 Commission has been considering changes to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct as they relate to domestic and international outsourcing. Yesterday, the Commission issued its Revised Draft Resolution on the subject for comment. The Revised Draft Resolution is the fourth version of proposed changes [...]

In an article in the July 27 Connecticut Law Tribune, Mark Dubois, Connecticut’s former chief disciplinary counsel, reveals a troubling misunderstanding of the national consensus concerning the ethics of legal outsourcing. Dubois—who, according to his firm’s website, “is recognized as an authority on lawyer discipline matters and the unauthorized practice of law”—was Connecticut’s chief disciplinary [...]

The Connecticut Law Tribune reports today that Connecticut state Rep. Patricia Dillon has introduced a bill designed to prevent companies from offshoring the drafting, reviewing or analyzing of legal documents to unlicensed workers overseas. The bill (HB 5083) amends Connecticut Gen. Stat. §51-88 “to provide that the practice of law includes (1) drafting, reviewing or [...]

Last week, the ABA’s Commission on Ethics 20/20 issued a discussion draft of proposed changes to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct as they relate to domestic and international outsourcing, along with a number of related documents, including (among other things) a compilation of the the comments it received. The commenters fall into a few [...]

Yesterday, the ABA’s Commission on Ethics 20/20 issued a discussion draft of proposed changes to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (or, more accurately, the comments to the Model Rules) as they relate to domestic and international outsourcing. The proposed changes don’t introduce anything new or surprising; rather, they merely elevate many of the points [...]

As Virginia Lawyers Weekly reported last Friday, the Virginia State Bar recently released a draft of its Legal Ethics Opinion 1850, entitled Outsourcing of Legal Services. The opinion doesn’t break any new ground; instead, it’s merely the most recent ethics opinion to support outsourcing. Although bar association ethics opinions relevant to outsourcing in general—and contract [...]

Last fall, I wrote about the risks that lawyers take when they outsource work to foreign legal process outsourcing companies. The primary risk I focused on wasn’t the possibility that the foreign provider might violate confidentiality or conflict of interest rules: it was the risk that the LPO company would produce substandard work. My last [...]

I’ve taken a fair amount of heat for pointing out that ABA Formal Op. 08-451, which states (with some important caveats) that foreign legal outsourcing is ethical, is actually good news for independent US-based contract lawyers because the same principles that allow firms to send legal work overseas also allow law students and graduates awaiting [...]