Main Image

About the Book

Ethical Problems in the Practice of Law

Front Cover - Ethical Problems in the Practice of Law

Third Edition

Lisa G. Lerman
The Catholic University of America

Philip G. Schrag
Georgetown University

2012. 976 pages. ISBN 13: 978-1-45480-0301-0. With Teacher's Manual.

E-Book now available

If you are a student using this book, click on the "Author Updates to the Text" link to see important changes and updates (including some changes to certain Model Rules) that occurred after the book went to press.  You may also want to use the "Supplemental Materials" link to view some additional material about topics discussed in the textbook.

 


Request Examination Copy

About the Book

"I really love this book, and the students love it too.  The lucid explanatory passages convey an enormous amount of information in a straightforward manner and let me devote more time to role playing exercises and dealing with more difficult or technically intricate concepts.  The book is a vast improvement over any text I’ve ever used, and I’ve been teaching professional responsibility for nearly 25 years."

– Robert P. Schuwerk, Professor, University of Houston Law School

------------------------------------------------

Covering all of the essential issues and topics, Ethical Problems in the Practice of Law, Second Edition, offers straightforward exposition and a combination of principal cases and real-case problems that generate lively class discussion and encourage strategic analysis.

Engage your students with a contemporary approach that features:

  • Authorship: Lerman and Schrag, both well known in the field, possess a broad range of teaching, consulting, clinical, research, and policy-making experience.
  • Contemporary approach succinctly covering all essential ethical issues and topics using clear, thorough exposition and requiring students to engage in simultaneous strategic and ethical analysis of challenging problems.
  • Thoughtful presentation of all ethics and professional responsibility topics and issues, such as confidentiality and conflicts, as well as applicable ethics rules, legal malpractice, disqualification, criminal law, wrongful discharge, pertinent constitutional law, and lawyers’ public responsibilities.
  • More than 70 compelling, detailed problems based on real cases and real-life situations relating to areas students are prepared to analyze and issues they are likely to experience during their first few years of practice.
  • Famous and less well-known actual cases appear are the basis of most of the problems, thus placing students in the lawyer’s role, not that of an academic judging the judge.
  • Recent and projected changes in the legal profession, including those resulting from the 2008 financial collapse, are featured in the final chapter.
  • Distinct graphical elements appear throughout the text to help students see the relationships among parts of rules or theory. The book also includes pictures of many of the experts quoted and lawyers featured in the text, as well as cartoons related to the ethical issues under discussion.
  • The Teacher’s Manual includes narrative summaries of each of the problems, detailed scripts for classroom discussion, and revelations of what really happened in these “not so hypothetical” scenarios.
  • A disk provided with the Teacher’s Manual contains an electronic version of the entire manual, enabling professors to paste the authors’ scripts for classroom discussion into their own class notes.
    New to the Third Edition
    • Hundreds of new examples and statistics that bring the book up to date.
    • New material on the changing legal profession, including developments on the acceleration of outsourcing legal work to India, law firms’ increased use of contract lawyers, internet advertising, third party financing of lawsuits, and international pressures to permit both multi-disciplinary practice and non-lawyer ownership of law firms.
    • Rules changes to allow screening to resolve some imputed conflicts of interest, and changes in the ethics rules for prosecutors.
    • Changes in the Justice Department’s policy toward waivers of the corporate attorney-client privilege.
    • Several new problems, including one based on the case of a former prosecutor who withheld evidence of another prosecutor’s misdeed, resulting in the conviction of an innocent man. 
    • On the website, a new recorded interview with the Guantanamo defense lawyer who was ordered to represent a defendant who did not want to be represented.

    Preface / Sample Chapters