Changes in Regulations of U.K., Australian Lawyers Could Affect U.S.

The United Kingdom and Australia may change the way they regulate the legal profession, and those changes could affect how lawyers are regulated here, says Theodore Schneyer, a law professor at the University of Arizona.

In a lecture at the Georgetown University Law Center Monday, Schneyer discussed measures in the U.K. and Australia designed to streamline regulation of the legal profession in the two countries.

The problem with the changes being made to the regulatory measures in those two countries is that they may conflict with rules adopted by states in the U.S.

Schneyer says one change in particular may pose a problem for firms that have offices in both the U.K. and the U.S. The U.K. allows non-lawyers, such as accountants, patent advisers and other professionals, to be admitted into the partnership. "That's great for clients because they can have a one-stop-shop law firm," Schneyer says. "The only trouble is that most U.S. firms can't do that."

In the U.S., Schneyer says, individual states adopt versions of the American Bar Association's Rules of Professional Conduct. One rule in particular prohibits firms from allowing non-lawyers into the partnership. D.C. is one of the few exceptions.

For firms that have offices in both the U.K. and the U.S., Schneyer says, that could mean individual lawyers in U.S. could be slapped with disciplinary actions by their respective state regulators.

"We should be thinking hard about the implications that these changes might have," Schneyer says.

There are several options regulators could take to address the discrepancy between U.K. and U.S. regulations, Schneyer says. One would be to change the rules state by state. But Schneyer says he could see another possibility happening first.

"There's the potential that large law firms might band together to try and have Congress pass a law that would preempt the state rules," Schneyer says.

Or regulators could simply choose to turn a blind eye to the conflict, which Schneyer says might create problems of its own.

"Sure, there are a lot of Mickey Mouse rules on the books that probably shouldn't be there," he says. "But from a public relations standpoint, it's not a very good thing for the legal profession to look like it accepts a bunch of scofflaws."

This article first appeared on The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times.

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