Psychotherapists' and physicians' sexual contact with their patients has been long held as unethical conduct. However, lawyers' sexual contact with clients has been largely ignored in the professional literature. This article uniquely anatomizes the similarities in the vulnerabilities and power imbalances that exist between psychotherapists' and lawyers' relationships with patients/clients. The...

So often we hear the legal profession berate expert witnesses as "hired guns" whose bias is for sale. While this may be relevant to a small minority of "experts", the majority do their job with integrity and in an ethical fashion. An advocate for a proposition will not call a witness to support a claim if it is clear that the witness holds an opposing view. It follows that the bias emanates fro...

We investigate if prior professional legal education either restrains or increases the extent to which the insider trades of company executives and directors are informed. We show that lawyer-insiders earn significantly lower abnormal returns than non-lawyers when they purchase their own company’s shares. Purchases of own company stock by lawyer-insiders are associated with lower future earning...

[1] Loyalty and independent judgment are essential elements in the lawyer's relationship to a client. Concurrent conflicts of interest can arise from the lawyer's responsibilities to another client, a former client or a third person or from the lawyer's own interests. For specific Rules regarding certain concurrent conflicts of interest, see Rule 1.8. For former client conflicts of interest, se...

Fear of being involved in a malpractice lawsuit has spawned various defensive attitudes and behaviors in physicians. Despite the relative low rate of malpractice suits against psychiatrists, they too engage in defensive medicine. Simon's and Shuman's paper reviews the hidden danger to clinical care that defensive psychiatric practices can pose to both patients and doctors. This commentary furth...

This paper examines how the advice that lawyers provide to their clients affects the disclosure of evidence and the outcome of adjudication, and how the adjudicator should allocate the burden of proof in light of these effects. Despite lawyers’ expertise in assessing the evidence, their advice is found to have no effect on adjudication, if the lawyers follow disclosure strategies that are undom...