The Simultaneity Puzzle: Lawyers Working at Multiple Law Firms

Abstract

This Article will explore in some detail the dynamics of a simultaneity arrangement and will explain why the usual arrangements are safe but not necessarily ethical. This Article will also contrast simultaneity involving a lawyer against that involving a law student. We encounter an attractive argument that the law student arrangement is less unethical because of the way the Model Rules address nonlawyer firm participants. But that argument, when applied to students whose simultaneity includes a clinical program in which the student practices as a certified law student, is not as persuasive once unpacked.

This Article, having concluded that simultaneity as typically practiced is difficult to square with the literal requirements of the Model Rules, proceeds to examine the "jury-rigged," functional arrangements found in practice. Those arrangements are likely to be quite client-protective and therefore could be approved (or not rejected) by disciplinary authorities and judges entertaining motions to disqualify. However, that proposition invites consideration of the question of whether a lawyer who proceeds outside of the strictures of her state's rules of professional conduct, albeit in a client-protective way, has acted in a defensible manner. In addition, this Article questions, with some deep skepticism, whether some law-of-lawyering guidance might expressly permit some form of simultaneity lawyering under some articulated circumstances.