Model Rules of Professional Conduct

An essential resource on lawyer ethics – revised and updated: The Annotated Model Rules of Professional Conduct is the ABA's definitive single-volume resource for information about how courts, disciplinary bodies, and ethics committees apply the lawyer ethics rules. The Tenth Edition incorporates all of the amendments the ABA has made to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct through February 2023 – including the 2020 amendments to Model Rule 1.8, permitting limited financial assistance to indigent clients under certain circumstances. This edition adds an annotation to Rule 1.0 (Terminology) and discussion of ethics issues relating to remote work, virtual law practice, fees paid in cryptocurrency, and recent efforts by some states to allow limited practice by nonlawyers.

Comprehensive and authoritative: Each chapter begins with the rule and its comment, a link to charts comparing each state’s rule with the Model Rule, and then presents a detailed discussion of how the rule has been applied. The book gives citations to thousands of court cases, ethics opinions, law review articles, and internet resources, as well as treatises, the Restatement (3rd) of the Law Governing Lawyers, and the legislative history of the Model Rules.

For all jurisdictions and practice settings: All state jurisdictions base their ethics rules on the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct.

• Most federal courts use a variant of either the Model Rules or the home state's version of the Model Rules as the basis for lawyer discipline.
• Most specialty tribunals exercising their own disciplinary powers also look to the ethics rules, whether or not they have formally adopted them.
• State and federal courts constantly turn to the ethics rules when deciding disqualification motions, motions for sanctions, motions to suppress, motions to quash, and disputes over fees and fee division, discovery, class certification, and pro hac vice admission status.

Suits involving lawyer malpractice and breach of fiduciary duty now routinely invoke the ethics rules, sometimes even in the jury instructions.

Helen W. Gunnarsson is an associate counsel for the American Bar Association’s Center for Professional Responsibility in Chicago, where she is a member of the team that reports, writes, and edits articles and chapters on lawyer ethics and professionalism for the ABA/BNA Lawyers’ Manual On Professional Conduct, a joint publication of the American Bar Association and Bloomberg BNA.  Before joining the ABA, she was a freelance contributing writer on substantive and timely law practice topics for the Illinois State Bar Association, pioneering ISBA’s nightly e-mail case digests and other e-mail newsletters and writing the LawPulse feature in the Illinois Bar Journal, ISBA’s flagship monthly publication, from its inception in 2001 and most of the IBJ’s cover stories from late 2005 through February, 2012. She was an online CLE presenter for MentorCLE.com and has trained employers in anti-harassment practices. 

Helen has published extensively and is a frequent presenter on lawyer ethics and the business of law. Her professional experience includes nearly ten years as an administrative law judge for the Illinois Human Rights Commission as well as positions as an assistant state’s attorney for Peoria County, a solo practitioner and special assistant state’s attorney in Galesburg, IL, and a Reginald Heber Smith staff attorney for West Central Illinois Legal Assistance (now part of Prairie State Legal Services) in Galesburg. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and the University of Illinois College of Law.