March/April 2001

Legal ethics and professional responsibility databases available on Westlaw

Answer those tough ethical questions

Not everything is black or white. When you have questions about those gray areas, access the Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility databases on Westlaw for the answers. Among the subjects included in the databases are attorney fees, disciplinary proceedings, legal ethics, attorney-client privilege and much more.

Listed below are a few of the helpful databases. To view a complete list of the databases, choose Topical Materials by Area of Practice at the Westlaw Directory. Then choose Legal Ethics & Professional Responsibility.

You can retrieve cases from the state courts of all 50 states and the District of Columbia pertaining to the regulation of the practice of law and of bar associations and their members by accessing the Multistate Legal Ethics & Professional Responsibility—Cases database (METH-CS). Individual state cases are found in databases with the identifier XXETH-CS, where XX is a state’s two-letter postal abbreviation.

To retrieve formal and informal ethics opinions issued by the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, access the Legal Ethics & Professional Responsibility—American Bar Association Ethics Opinions database (ABA-ETHOP).

To retrieve the American Bar Association’s rules governing attorneys and the ethical practice of law, access the ABA Annotated Model Rules of Professional Conduct database (ABA-AMRPC). Each rule is accompanied by comments, annotations and a comparison of the rule to any similar predecessor rules found in the ABA Model Code of Professional Responsibility.

The ABA/BNA Lawyers’ Manual on Professional Conduct database (ABA-BNA), updated monthly, contains information on ethical and professional issues typically encountered by lawyers, including coverage of fee arrangements, confidentiality, conflicts of interest, law firm relationships, legal malpractice and withdrawal from representation. The database also contains the full text of ABA ethics opinions and digests of state and local ethics opinions beginning with 1986.

To locate law review and journal articles on legal ethics, access the Legal Ethics & Professional Responsibility—Law Reviews, Texts & Bar Journals database (ETH-TP). The database contains documents from law reviews, texts, American Jurisprudence 2d, CLE course materials, bar journals and legal practice-oriented periodicals.