Ethics

Article here from members of the Rules Revision Commission.  I agree with them on most of the facts they assert, but disagree with their conclusions.  Here's a taste of what they dislike:

The current Rules of Professional Conduct and the official comments to those Rules take up 29 double column pages in the State Bar's Publication 250, "California Rules of Professional Conduct and the State Bar Act." An incomplete late draft of the new version takes up 99 pages of the same format. The actual "final, final" work product will be still longer. Is there so much new and regulatory development in the law of lawyers that the details of lawyers' regulation have become more than three times more complicated in just over 20 years? The answer is no.

To be sure, the proposed new Rules include many new and sometimes painful regulations; but the main part of the expansion lies in hopelessly wordy, academic and obscure musings called Comments. For instance, proposed Rule 1.7, entitled "Conflict of Interest: Clients," has 38 comments, but even so it is not the only rule dealing with conflicts of interest. Depending on how you count them, there are at least 8 more conflict of interest rules. By contrast, the only current rule concerning conflicts of interest - Rule 3-310 - has just 12 paragraphs of "Discussion," many of which are just two to three lines long, while Comment 22 to proposed Rule 1.7 is 42 lines long all by itself! And that is just one of 38 Comments to that one proposed Rule. We will discuss the substantive content of the Rules and Comments later.