Ethics

Laurel Terry's new paper is available on SSRN here.  It traces the recent history of treating the legal profession as just one of many service providers, and offers predictions about where that approach will lead.  What follows is my interpretation of her article.  Much of the new regulation will be hammered out by bureaucrats fashioning international pacts.  That will put pressure on the distinctive aspects of any given country's legal profession, and will tend to treat lawyers as source of information for government bureaucracies and as leverage points to ensure legal compliance.  It will be a brave new world when, for example, the State Bar of California is told that some part of its regulatory scheme was trumped by a conference in Belgium.  Or maybe that's already happening.