Paralegal's Guide to Professional Responsibility

Professional responsibility is at the core of delivering effective legal services. Paralegals are expected to obey the ethics rules by which their lawyer employers are bound. To help paralegals stay on top of ethics issues, the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility has updated The Paralegal's Guide to Professional Responsibility. The fifth edition reviews the ethics issues that are relevant to paralegals, legal assistants, secretaries, and other employees of law firms, corporations, and law-related organizations and offers guidance that can be adapted to practice in any jurisdiction. This edition encompasses all recent changes to the Model Rules, along with updated references to court decisions and other resources. The book is designed to help paralegals understand key areas of the Model Rules and related ethics issues. Subjects include:

• what constitutes the unauthorized practice of law
• what a lawyer cannot delegate to a paralegal
• the issues of competence and diligence in a paralegal's work
• the paralegal and confidentiality
• conflicts of interest
• client funds and property
• advertising
• legal fees and employee compensation
• Develop ethics research skills

In addition to a thorough examination of the Model Rules as they relate to paralegals, the Guide provides an introduction to basic texts and materials used in legal ethics research and includes:

• concise explanations of the law of professional responsibility
• tools for identifying and resolving ethical problems
• practical tips to use in everyday practice
• a method for categorizing most legal ethics materials
• Time-saving features and appendices

To help you find the information you need quickly, the book includes time saving features such as chapter summaries, quick-reference text boxes, bullet points, and easy-to-find chapter divisions related to specific subtopics. The Guide also includes an index, a glossary of terms and several appendices containing requirements, rules, codes, research aids and guidelines of use to the legal assistant.

Art Garwin served as Director of the American Bar Association Center for Professional Responsibility from 2013-2016. His responsibilities included management and coordination of the efforts of staff and entities including five ABA Standing Committees (Ethics, Professionalism, Professional Regulation, Client Protection, and Specialization), the ABA/BNA Lawyers’ Manual on Professional Conduct, the Center’s Coordinating Council and other Center working committees. 

Art joined the ABA and the Center in 1990 and managed the production of the ABA National Conference on Professional Responsibility for 20 years.  He also served as Staff Counsel to the ABA Task Force on the Future of Legal Education, ABA Standing Committee on Professionalism, ABA Commission on Multidisciplinary Practice and ABA Task Force on the Model Definition of the Practice of Law.  

He also served as editor of The Professional Lawyer and Journal for 20 years, and wrote numerous articles on professional responsibility for the ABA Journal, and a chapter on Confidentiality and Its Relationship to the Attorney-Client Privilege in the ABA book, The Attorney-Client Privilege in Civil Litigation.  He is the author of The Paralegal’s Guide to Professional Responsibility, co-author and editor of the Annotated Model Code of Judicial Conduct, editor of A Legislative History of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, 1982-2013 and co-editor of the first edition of the Annotated Standards for Imposing Lawyer Sanctions. 

He is a former member of the ABA Standing Committee on CLE, the Chicago Council of the American Writers Museum, and the Advisory Board of the Miller-Becker Center for Professional Responsibility at the University of Akron School of Law.  He has B.S. and J.D. degrees from the University of Illinois and an M.B.A. from Northwestern University.  He practiced law for 15 years before joining the ABA in 1990.