Lerach to Lecture on Legal Ethics at Pittsburgh?

Given how much press the Lynne Stewart story got, this is sure to get some attention as well. 

Unlike Stewart, who gave a single lecture at an ethics conference, William Lerach could be more heavily involved in teaching the basic legal ethics course at Pittsburgh.  Lerach's sentencing memo (see page 25) suggests that he wouldn't be the primary faculty member in charge of the course, but that he would simply be a regular lecturer in pre-existing courses.   (The memo is somewhat unclear as to how much authority he would have in the classroom.)

I don't see a problem with using Lerach as a frequent guest speaker in an existing course, though I would have more concerns if he were going to be the primary teacher for the legal ethics class.  It is pretty common in legal ethics courses to invite guest lecturers to talk about their ethical violations, so I don't see Lerach's involvement in an ethics class to be extraordinary if it takes that form. 

But if he were asked to teach his own course, I think that would send the wrong message to students.  Whereas a lecturer can be held out as a cautionary tale, the person in charge of the course is being held out by the law school as an expert on legal ethics.  Lerach can certainly tell the cautionary tale, but I don't think he should be held out as a legal ethics expert for students.  The sentencing memo suggests that Pittsburgh is erring on the right side of this line (just as I think Hofstra erred on the right side of this line), but the details of this proposed arrangement are still a bit unclear.

Comments

[Jack Marshall]

Blessings upon you, John, for being one of the few to raise this issue. Lerach wrote an Op-Ed for the Washington Post in November that contained this revealing passage: "I've dedicated my career to holding powerful corporations accountable when they victimized innocent people. CEOs such as Enron's Jeffrey K. Skilling, WorldCom's Bernard J. Ebbers and Tyco's L. Dennis Kozlowski all went to prison for their fraud. Now I'm being held accountable for overzealously pursuing these corporate scam artists." Does that sound contrite to you? It is also, of course, misleading: the facts would support a conclusion that greed, rather than over-zealousness, was the motivation for his unethical conduct.

An attorney that could blatantly cross such a bright-line ethics rule as Lerach did is either lacking an ethics alarm system or has muffled his clapper. To entrust the teaching of legal ethics to such an individual seems to me to show a fundamental misunderstanding of what ethics is. I'm sure Lerach knows the Rules he broke backwards and forwards now. I'm also sure he knew them before he broke them.

[Andrew Perlman]

Jack,

Thanks for the comment. I tell my students that legal ethics is so much more than learning the law governing lawyers. Being able to do the right thing when the world places pressure on us to do the wrong is the hard part.

As an aside, I put up this post, but John certainly deserves blessings as well!

Andy

[John Burkoff]

The Legal Ethics course that I proposed that Bill Lerach teach here at Pitt would be team taught with me and tentatively titled: "What Not To Do." I think it will be a terrific course!