Professionalism Page

• Publication year: 2022
• Pages: 0066

Professionalism Page Vol. 28 No. 3 Pg. 66 Georgia Bar Journal December, 2022

The Voice of Experience

Georgia lawyers should heed the voice of experience that reminds them that one aspect of professionalism is to fulfill their role in defining part of the character of our society.

BY KARLISE Y. GRIER

I recently had the pleasure of conducting a professionalism training for a voluntary bar association. One of the reasons I enjoy leading these trainings is because I have the opportunity to meet and learn from wonderful lawyers from around the state and from various practice areas. This was the case most recently. During the professionalism CLE training, the attendees and I discussed a hypothetical problem, which asked lawyers to consider a fact pattern as follows:

Your client is marketing a property for sale and there is only one bidder; nevertheless your client wants you to try to help them get the price up by speaking to the attorney for the one bidder. Your client wants you to lead opposing counsel to believe that there are lots of competing bids, but if the bidder goes up in price, the bidder will win the bid.^[1]

My question to the lawyers who attended the CLE was: "Would you lead opposing counsel to believe that there are lots of competing bids?" Attorneys shared a variety of views regarding the approach to the problem—as did the attendees of the CLE when the Commission first used the hypothetical problem in February 2022. What captured my attention during this in-person CLE, which allowed for interactive engagement with an audience I could observe, was how the responses of the attendees varied, in part, based on how long the lawyers who answered the question had practiced law.

One of the answers that most surprised me came from seasoned attorney John M. Clark, who has been practicing law for 43 years. He responded by saying that he would consider, and ask his client to consider, if the action the client proposed was really in the client's best interest. It was an intriguing question that led to some thoughtful discussions among the CLE attendees. In the past, when I have conducted CLEs using this question, I have asked attorneys to contrast what might be allowed by the rules of ethics—the minimum standards that lawyers are required to follow—with the professionalism aspirations—the higher ideals that lawyers are expected to voluntarily follow.^[2] Comment 2 to Rule 4.1 of the Georgia Rules of Professional Conduct...