Civil Rights Claims Brought in the State Courts of Illinois 1996 - 2000 DuPage County Bar Association All Rights Reserved. Nowhere is this maxim truer than when applied to lawyers. Knowing when to report another lawyer s misconduct, recognizing and resolving conflicts of interest, understanding how to safekeep property held in trust for a client, determining what circumstances a client s confidences must be revealed, may be revealed or must not be revealed, these are the kinds of questions concerning a lawyer s professional obligations that can t be resolved by intuition or guess work. When questions arise concerning a lawyer s ethical duties, lawyers need to approach them as they would any substantive issue that would develop during the course of their practice - with well reasoned and well researched answers.
Many lawyers are, however, unfamiliar with the sources for researching ethics issues.
Rather than conduct research, some lawyers either rely solely on their own sense of fairness and personal experience in order to resolve ethical dilemmas or, worse, rely on the futile hope that the problem will somehow go away on its own. Most simple questions arising under the Illinois ethical rules can be resolved by reference to the 1990 Rules. Moreover, the Rules may not always provide answers to certain difficult questions. 6 Below is a checklist of the primary and secondary sources, as well as some of the more commonly used research aids, that lawyers should look to for guidance on ethics issues. This checklist is by no means a complete listing of all the resources available on ethics law.