Legal Ethics + Professional Responsibility
Our Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Group, one of the nation’s largest and most prominent, spans a wide range of litigation, advisory and investigative services.
We regularly represent lawyers, law firms, and corporate legal departments on sensitive ethical, professional responsibility, and dispute resolution matters. We have also successfully defended lawyers facing disciplinary charges, malpractice, fraud and breach of fiduciary duty claims, sanctions, disqualification and reputational issues.
In a rapidly changing legal world, we are recognized leaders in structuring and interpreting law firm transactions and legal etch transactions, as well as advising on partnership agreements; handling partnership disputes; counseling attorneys leaving their law firms; advising with respect to litigation funding; and guiding firms on the use of artificial intelligence. In addition, we regularly advise on attorney-client privilege and work product issues, attorney liens, attorney admissions, attorney reinstatement from suspension or disbarment and multi-jurisdictional legal practice.
We also represent clients in potential disputes with their current or former counsel, including fee disputes and legal malpractice.
Our lawyers have chaired ethics and professional responsibility committees throughout New York, two of our partners have served a Presidents of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers (“APRL”) and we have helped draft changes to both the American Bar Association Model Rules and the New York Rules of Professional Conduct. Our lawyers have also served on the Attorneys’ Liability Subcommittee of the ABA Professional Liability Litigation Committee and have chaired and served as members of numerous other committees for the New York State Bar Association, the New York City Bar Association, and the New York County Lawyers’ Association. We have also taught ethics and professional responsibility at New York University School of Law, Fordham Law School, Brooklyn Law School and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. We have written and lectured extensively on the law of lawyering, the attorney-client privilege, transactional and other conflicts of interest, and ethical duties of lawyer-directors, multijurisdictional practice, and the obligations of departing law partners.
Our lawyers are also regularly retained to opine as experts on ethics and professional responsibility issues.
Defended lawyers in the first sanctions hearing arising from the reference to “hallucinated” citations on Chat GPT.
Represented a national law firm in the formation of an alternative business structure (ABS) in Arizona;
Represented a well-known international consulting firm in a litigation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in a dispute the firm had with a former co-client regarding the return of their client file;
Represented an AMLAW 100 law firm in successfully defending a claim for fraud and malicious prosecution claims arising out of the sale of handwritten lyrics by a famous songwriter;
Represented law firms, private equity investors, an legal tech companies in MSO and legal tech transactions and investments;
Represented clients in obtaining multi-million dollar settlements against their law firms for malpractice and other claims.