The AALS Professional Responsibility Section invites papers for its program “2024 New Voices Workshop.” The goal of this audience interactive workshop is to provide a forum for new voices and new ideas related to professional responsibility (PR), broadly defined.

Many scholars might address PR without realizing it. We are interested in your potential contributions whether you are an evidence scholar writing about the attorney-client privilege, a feminist interested in gender dynamics that affect lawyering, a critical race scholar commenting on how power plays out in legal systems, an ethicist exploring the moral foundations of the rules governing lawyering, or something entirely different.

Toward that end, we encourage you to submit a proposal even if you are pursuing scholarship on PR for the first time, even if you question whether your ideas really do relate to PR, and even if you are reticent to submit for some other reason.

The selected papers will be presented at the AALS Annual Meeting in January of 2024.

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:

The Workshop will be an opportunity to nurture the growth of a broad scholarly community in the field of Professional Responsibility and Legal Ethics. As such, it is a place to take risks and develop…

Last month, the SEC released a report on Mandatory Arbitration Among SEC-Registered Advisers.  The report tackles a basic dispute resolution problem.  For context, investors with a problem with a financial adviser will likely have to go to arbitration.  If their financial adviser is an associated person for a FINRA-registered brokerage firm, the dispute will likely go through FINRA arbitration.  While the FINRA system isn’t perfect, it’s often much better than any other alternative out there.  FINRA has made improvements to its arbitration process over the years resulting in a forum that has become fairer for investors.

But many financial advisers are not brokers.  They are registered investment advisers.  They usually charge fees on an assets under management basis.  Where do disputes against these RIA firms go?  It depends on what kind of pre-dispute arbitration agreement exists between the adviser and the investor.  The SEC report details the current options available to investors.

Here’s the short version, far too many RIAs have put in place arbitration agreements that effectively frustrate an investor’s ability to resolve a complaint.  Most of these agreements force investors to resolve their disputes through AAA–the American Arbitration Association.  Within that forum, Advisers generally elect to apply…

The Nevada Supreme Court recently delivered an opinion on Series LLCs.  These entities are relatively new and not much caselaw on them currently exists so it’s good to get some more guidance about how to deal with them.

The case, Federal Housing Finance Agency v. Saticoy Bay LLC, reached the Nevada Supreme Court on a certified question from the Ninth Circuit about how to obtain jurisdiction over series LLC entities.  In short, the question the Ninth Circuit wanted answered was whether a court obtained jurisdiction over series entities by naming the master LLC itself or whether the individual series must be sued in its own name to establish jurisdiction over it?  Nevada’s Supreme Court answered that naming the individual series LLC at issue was not an “optional” matter.  To establish jurisdiction over a series entity, the entity itself must be sued.  It found that the “plain language of NRS 86.296(2) does not allow a party to sue a master LLC in lieu of a series LLC at the party’s discretion.”

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Submissions and nominations of articles are being accepted for the fourteenth annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility.  To honor Fred’s memory, the committee will select from among articles in the field of Professional Responsibility with a publication date of 2023.  The prize will be awarded at the 2024 AALS Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.  Please send submissions and nominations to Professor Samuel Levine at Touro Law Center: slevine@tourolaw.edu.  The deadline for submissions and nominations is September 1, 2023

California Western School of Law (CWSL) is seeking lateral candidates for a full-time faculty position teaching Professional Responsibility and serving as a Director of CWSL’s STEPPS Program.  STEPPS is a key component of CWSL’s innovative sequential experiential curriculum, bridging the gap between the first-year legal skills program and third-year clinical and externship programs.  STEPPS integrates the teaching of professional responsibility with an experiential small “law firm” component. 

The role combines the doctrinal teaching of professional responsibility and an administrative component managing the STEPPS Program.  The majority of the time spent in the role will be dedicated to the teaching component, however, the Director will also work closely with the STEPPS staff coordinator to supervise the adjunct professors who teach the experiential component of the program.  We welcome lateral candidates with an established record of scholarship who are seeking tenured/tenure-track positions.  We also welcome clinical faculty seeking a clinical position with security of appointment under ABA Accreditation Standard 405(c).  The timing of this job opening corresponds to a periodic review of the STEPPS curriculum, and so the new Director will both be directing a mature program, but also be part of the process of ensuring the program remains innovative moving forward.  …

Earlier today the Supreme Court released its opinion in Slack Technologies LLC v. Pirani.  It ruled that a plaintiff seeking to bring a Section 11 claim must trace their stock to a registration statement.  Of course, companies today now go public through direct listings or other methods where the pool of publicly traded stock includes some issued pursuant to registration statement and some from other prior holders.  Functionally, this often makes it impossible to for anyone buying shares in the open market to trace whether their shares were issued pursuant to a registration statement or simply sold by someone else.

The unanimous decision follows the vast majority of circuit courts to consider the issue.  It pointed out that the issue was previously addressed by Judge Friendly in Barnes v. Osofsky, 373 F. 2d 269, 272 (CA2 1967).