Executive Director's Report • November 2024

Ethics at Your Fingertips

As attorneys, we all know we must follow the rules of professional conduct. But that’s just a minimum. Above and beyond these rules, we strive to achieve the highest ethical standards as upholders of the law’s place in society. Such a lofty goal can be daunting for any lawyer, but your State Bar has you covered with a variety of resources to help you.

These include online and in-person courses, an ethics helpline, a monthly column in the Texas Bar Journal, emails you can sign up for, websites, books, and more.

You probably already know about the courses we offer that count toward your ethics CLE requirement of three hours per year. To take a look at the offerings, including free courses, go to texasbarcle.com. But do you know where to go when you have an ethical dilemma as a lawyer?

The State Bar provides a number of options to help you find your answer. First, check to see if your question has already been addressed in a published ethics opinion by the Professional Ethics Committee for the State Bar of Texas (PEC). The committee is made up of nine members of the bar and the judiciary appointed by the Supreme Court of Texas.

All of the committee’s published opinions are archived and searchable from the website of the Texas Center for Legal Ethics, legalethicstexas.com. The center is an independent nonprofit that offers ethics reference materials, including attorney ethics opinions, courses, and public education on ethics and professionalism for the legal industry and judiciary.

If you find that your question has not previously been answered, you can call the State Bar’s toll-free Attorney Ethics Helpline at 800-532-3947. The calls go to two State Bar attorneys and are returned promptly in the order received.

If after trying these options, you find that you still want additional guidance, you can ask the PEC to consider issuing an opinion on your specific ethics question. Submit your request online at texasbar.com/pec. (On this site, you can also sign up to receive email notifications of pending opinions being released for public comment.)

Want more ethics content? Look right in this magazine. The Texas Center for Legal Ethics produces the Ethics Question of the Month, one of the most popular features in the Texas Bar Journal. All columns are archived on the center’s website, too, for review any time.

Sincerely,

TREY APFFEL
Executive Director, State Bar of Texas
Editor in Chief, Texas Bar Journal