Categories : Legal Ethics
Inadvertent Disclosure: The Evolution of an Ethics Rule
By David Carr
Most attorneys are familiar with the ethical rules that govern our professional conduct to some degree. Most attorneys, however, don’t pay much attention to the processes that create ethical rules. There may be some tendency to take these rules for granted, to assume that they reflect such ancient verities that they must have always been around in some form. In fact, written ethical rules for the legal profession are less than 200 years old and far from reflecting eternal truths, they have often changed with the times as the norms of the profession change. In California, they are in process of what might well be a very radical change.