Crisis Lawyering

Shines a light on the emerging field of law dedicated to responding to and resolving the crises of the twenty-first century In an increasingly globalized world, a complex and interlocking web of nations, governments, non-state actors, laws, and rules affect human behavior. When crisis hits—whether that be extrajudicial detention, unprompted deportation, pandemics, or natural disasters—lawyers are increasingly among the first responders, equipped with the knowledge necessary to navigate the regulations of this ever more complex world. Crisis Lawyering explores this phenomenon and attempts to identify and define what it means to engage in the practice of law in crisis situations. In so doing, it hopes to sketch out the contours of the emerging field of crisis lawyering. Contributors to this volume explore cases surrounding domestic violence; dealing with immigrants in detention and banned from travel; policing in Ferguson, Missouri; the kidnapping of journalists; and climate change, among other crises. Their analysis not only serves as guidance to lawyers in such situations, but also helps others who deal with crises understand those crises—and the role of lawyers in them—better so that they may respond to them more effectively, efficiently, collaboratively and creatively. Crisis Lawyering shines a light on the emerging field of law dedicated to responding to and resolving the complex crises of the twenty-first century.

Shines a light on the emerging field of law dedicated to responding to and resolving the crises of the twenty-first century In an increasingly globalized world, a complex and interlocking web of nations, governments, non-state actors, laws, and rules affect human behavior. When crisis hits—whether that be extrajudicial detention, unprompted deportation, pandemics, or natural disasters—lawyers are increasingly among the first responders, equipped with the knowledge necessary to navigate the regulations of this ever more complex world. Crisis Lawyering explores this phenomenon and attempts to identify and define what it means to engage in the practice of law in crisis situations. In so doing, it hopes to sketch out the contours of the emerging field of crisis lawyering. Contributors to this volume explore cases surrounding domestic violence; dealing with immigrants in detention and banned from travel; policing in Ferguson, Missouri; the kidnapping of journalists; and climate change, among other crises. Their analysis not only serves as guidance to lawyers in such situations, but also helps others who deal with crises understand those crises—and the role of lawyers in them—better so that they may respond to them more effectively, efficiently, collaboratively and creatively. Crisis Lawyering shines a light on the emerging field of law dedicated to responding to and resolving the complex crises of the twenty-first century.

Crisis Counsel: Navigating Legal and Communication Conflict, by Tony Jaques, Ph.D. is a new book by Rothstein Publishing. This book is designed to provide hands-on, practical guidance for senior executives, lawyers and public relations professionals to navigate crises and to balance conflicting advice from lawyers and communication professionals while promoting open communication and protecting legal liability. The book will help you to: Balance reputation protection and legal obligation during a crisis. Know why and how to apologize without increasing liability. Weigh legal and communications advice when a crisis strikes. Learn from original research which lets lawyers and communicators speak in their own words. Draw practical everyday lessons from real-world examples of conflict between lawyers and communicators. Navigate the legal and communication challenges of dealing with the media in a crisis. Motivate lawyers and communicators to work better together. Identify and avoid crucial areas of potential conflict from selected crisis case studies. Understand the essential difference between corporate responsibility and legal liability. Make decisions and do the right thing to protect your organization. The book includes a wide variety of global case studies and examples while analyzing how legal and communications advice was managed and the impact on reputation. Crisis Counsel also includes interviews with four of the leading global experts on crisis management and the conclusions of a focused, unique global survey of senior lawyers.

A noble profession is facing its defining moment. From law schools to the prestigious firms that represent the pinnacle of a legal career, a crisis is unfolding. News headlines tell part of the story—the growing oversupply of new lawyers, widespread career dissatisfaction, and spectacular implosions of pre-eminent law firms. Yet eager hordes of bright young people continue to step over each other as they seek jobs with high rates of depression, life-consuming hours, and little assurance of financial stability. The Great Recession has only worsened these trends, but correction is possible and, now, imperative. In The Lawyer Bubble, Steven J. Harper reveals how a culture of short-term thinking has blinded some of the nation’s finest minds to the long-run implications of their actions. Law school deans have ceded independent judgment to flawed U.S. News & World Report rankings criteria in the quest to maximize immediate results. Senior partners in the nation’s large law firms have focused on current profits to enhance American Lawyer rankings and individual wealth at great cost to their institutions. Yet, wiser decisions—being honest about the legal job market, revisiting the financial incentives currently driving bad behavior, eliminating the billable hour model, and more—can take the profession to a better place. A devastating indictment of the greed, shortsightedness, and dishonesty that now permeate the legal profession, this insider account is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how things went so wrong and how the profession can right itself once again.

Throughout history, the American legal profession has tried to hold tight to its identity by retreating into its traditional values and structure during times of self-perceived crisis. The American Legal Profession in Crisis: Resistance and Responses to Change analyzes the efforts of the legal profession to protect and maintain the status quo even as the world around it changed. Author James E. Moliterno, consistently argues that the profession has resisted societal change and sought to ban or discourage new models of legal representation created by such change. In response to every crisis, lawyers asked: "How can we stay even more 'the same' than we already are?" The legal profession has been an unwilling, capitulating entity to any transformation wrought by the overwhelming tide of change. Only when the shifts in society, culture, technology, economics, and globalization could no longer be denied did the legal profession make any proactive changes that would preserve status quo. This book demonstrates how the profession has held to its anachronistic ways at key crisis points in US history: Watergate, communist infiltration, waves of immigration, the explosion of litigation, and the current economic crisis that blends with dramatic changes in technology, communications, and globalization. Ultimately, Moliterno urges the profession to look outward and forward to find in society and culture the causes and connections with these periodic crises. Doing so would allow the profession to grow with the society, solve problems with, rather than against, the flow of society, and be more attuned to the very society the profession claims to serve. This paperback version includes a commentary on the prevailing crisis in legal education.

This volume offers a series of short and highly self-reflective essays by leading international lawyers on the relation between international law and crises. It particularly shows that international law shapes the crises that it addresses as much as it is shaped by them. It critically evaluates the modes of intervention of international law in the problems of the world. Together these essays provide a unique stocktaking about the role, limits, and potential of international law as well as the worlds that are imagined through international lawyers’ vocabularies.

Extensively revised and updated, The Law and Ethics of Lawyering provides an overview of the ethics of practicing law and discusses relevant provisions of the American Law Institute's Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers. Many segments of the book are substantially enhanced, including the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege, disclosure of client identity, client fraud on third persons or on a tribunal, regulation of excessive fees, the role of the government lawyer, responsibilities of the lawyer for a class, form-of-practice restrictions, regulation of multi-state and international practice, and choice of law in a multi-state practice.

This work is a collection of articles that explore the tension between the law governing the conduct of lawyers and the complex ethics of lawyering that pulls against that law and competes with it. This collection emphasizes the regulatory framework that has developed to govern the conduct of lawyers and draws heavily on the work of law and economics scholars.