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Over the past 4 decades, the Bar and U.S. legal system more generally have stepped increasingly away from simply following the law. Laws that are inconvenient or otherwise at odds with Bar regulators and courts personal views have been simply ignored. As just one example, Ethics Rule 8.3(a) — the legal profession’s Honor Code, requiring lawyers to report other lawyers who have lied or otherwise engaged in conduct raising a substantial question as to their fitness to practice — has never been enforced in D.C. or virtually any of the 49 states that have it on its books.

ABA Model Rules 1.6(b), 1.13(b), 3.3.(a) and 8.3(a) — generally followed by all 51 jurisdictions and mandating the disclosure of crimes and fraud by other attorneys and sometimes even by one’s client, were expanded exponentially in the wake of public revelations of attorney silence and complicity in the 2001 Enron scandal, but Bar regulators in virtually every jurisdiction routinely ignore the expansions.

In particular, the ABA and virtually every jurisdiction expand the scope of harm that attorneys must disclose from merely bodily harm that might occur in the future, to bodily or financial harm harm, future or past. Given attorneys’ important role in our social order, the harm from Bar failures in ignoring these Rules is made plain daily.

The Legal Profession No Longer Polices Itself: Almost a decade before the Enron revelations, former Yale Law School Dean Anthony Kronman warned that, “Every year produces … renewed doubts about the ability of the profession to police itself.”  The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession (1993). The same decade and upon learning of widespread attorney silence in the context of the 5-Senator Savings & Loan Scandal, the Honorable Stanley Sporkin famously asked, “Where were the lawyers?” Despite these warnings and now almost two decades after the post-Enron reforms, Bar authorities have almost completely (and in some jurisdictions, completely) ignored them.

The D.C. Bar as an Example: Taking D.C. an important example, this website identifies 5 specific inquiries to Bar regulators; 7 longstanding violations by Bar regulators; and 9 specific changes needed to D.C.’s Rules to conform them to the ABA’s Model Rules and/or those of other jurisdictions. Critiques focused on the D.C. Bar date back at least to 2005. M. Frisch, No Stone Left Unturned: The Failure of Attorney Self-Regulation in the District of Columbia, 18 G’Town Jnl. of Legal Ethics 325 (2005). Notably, the 2005 critique is by an ethics professor who had worked for 17 years within D.C.’s Office of Bar Counsel. Although, in the year following the 2005 critique, D.C.’s Court of Appeals prominently warned that “Compliance with [Ethics] Rules … depends … upon enforcement,” the D.C. Bar has never enforced two of the disclosure Rules (and only once enforced the third).

Bar Responses: Aware of the D.C. Bar’s notorious retaliation against attorneys who observe the Rules’ reporting or other disclosure requirements, TTERN focuses on violations that are dispositively shown. Bar responses to 5 inquiries and other website content can be emailed to admin@ttern.org and will be posted here.