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Article

Abstract

Although the entire legal profession shares a single ethical code, lawyers’ understanding of what it means to be “ethical” shows considerable variation. This article discusses the factors that shape lawyers’ ethical conduct in practice. We review the role of legal education, bar associations, the workplace, and hard and soft regulators in the construction of lawyers’ ethical values. We then explore the important role that practice contexts play in shaping lawyers’ understanding of appropriate ethical conduct. Some of the key explanatory factors for differences among lawyers include type of client, office size, specialty and specialization, regulators, and the extent to which lawyers engage in litigation. We then anticipate new ethical challenges for lawyers created by market pressures and other factors and identify questions for future research.

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Copyright © 2024 by the author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information. Originally published in Annu. Rev. Law Soc. Sci. 2024. 20:163–81 at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-041822- 033834

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