Megan McDermott shares her experiences in the ever-evolving world of professional ethics.
Professional ethics is a rich and complex topic that has seen its fair share of evolution over the years.
It’s an area with a lot of hypotheticals where the only answer is “It depends.” For over a decade, Megan McDermott, associate teaching professor at University of Wisconsin Law School, has been exploring scenarios in the classroom and Continuing Legal Education courses.
“Whether I am teaching brand new 1Ls or lawyers who have been practicing for 30 years, there’s something about the profession and about the topic of ethics that drives people to want to flip the script and toss out their own hypotheticals during a lesson,” said McDermott.
In April, she published “Greg Needs a Lawyer: Is He Getting an Ethical One?” in DePaul Law Review’s symposium issue. The essay highlighted the legal and ethical issues involved in the HBO show “Succession.” Specifically, the essay focuses on Greg Hirsch, a naïve and anxious employee of the corrupt Waystar/Royco conglomerate, run by Greg’s powerful great-uncle. With the federal government preparing to prosecute the company for its misdeeds, Greg knows he needs legal representation but doesn’t have any idea how to find (or pay for) an attorney who will represent his interests. The essay takes an in-depth look at two scenes in which unscrupulous attorneys with ulterior motives offer their services to Greg.
The DePaul symposium materialized out of a Zoom discussion series organized by Diane Kemker and Susan Bandes which was modeled on a pandemic-era program called Yada Yada Law School, in which various law professors gave weekly Zoom lectures on legal topics from “Seinfeld.” But the inspiration for McDermott’s essay came in large part from her Professional Responsibilities students during the Spring of 2022.
“I frequently used movie and television clips as discussion prompts during class, and students lobbied me to use a similar format for the take-home exam,” she explained. “I assigned them two scenes from HBO’s ‘Succession’ to critique and/or defend from a professional ethics standpoint.”
The scenes implicated a wide range of professional ethics issues, including attorney competence, conflicts of interest and client confidentiality. McDermott said her students did a terrific job spotting the issues and analyzing them.
“It was the most entertaining grading experience in my 12 years of teaching,” she said.
The exercise also allowed her to highlight to students the often-unrealistic ways Hollywood portrays lawyers.
“Knowing the ethics rules helps protect students from costly mistakes and ensures that they can fully capitalize on the career investment they are making.” – Megan McDermott
“More often than not, TV shows and movies focus on lawyers behaving badly, or at least in ways that are unrealistic,” she said. “I worry that these media portrayals give the public a skewed perspective on the characteristics of an effective lawyer, and misguided ideas about what an ethical lawyer will be able to do for them.”
The media doesn’t usually show the hours spent researching, the necessary drudgery of cite-checking and Bluebook formatting or the fact that effective lawyers typically listen much more than they talk, she added.
“None of this is especially glamorous, but it comes with the territory,” she said. “Students are making a massive investment of time and money when they choose to spend three years in law school, with the goal of becoming a lawyer. Knowing the ethics rules helps protect students from costly mistakes and ensures that they can fully capitalize on the career investment they are making.”
Emerging Issues
Megan McDermott began teaching ethics at UW Law in 2013. A highly regarded scholar in the field, she’s witnessed numerous transitions over the last decade. One of the most significant evolutions she’s seen has been the focus on attorney wellness.
“We’ve known for decades that the majority of attorney discipline problems are connected to mental health and/or substance use issues, but it took us a while to start talking openly about these issues,” she explained. “Over the last decade, law schools have normalized talking about these issues, and the profession has also begun to recognize the importance of promoting healthy approaches to practice.”
Another prominent emerging trend facing current and future lawyers is the use of artificial intelligence (AI), more specifically using generative language models (like ChatGPT) to assist in drafting legal documents.
As these technologies revolutionize the practice of law, McDermott explained, they are also raising numerous ethical questions, including whether competent representation requires familiarity with the pros and cons of various AI tools, whether the use of particular technologies could violate the attorney’s duty to keep client information confidential and whether attorneys are charging unreasonable fees if they devote billable hours to tasks that could be accomplished as effectively using these technologies.
McDermott said it’s exciting working in a field that’s always evolving.
“The practice of law is always changing, and figuring out how lawyers can ethically adapt to these changes keeps things interesting,” she said. “There are always new issues to explore.”