ethics

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In law school, students take a professional responsibility exam and then take the MPRE exam. After graduation, they sit through (often boring) continuing legal education courses and try to get that precious ethics credit.

I don’t teach professional responsibility anymore, although I do speak about ethics in my Compliance, Corporate Governance, and Sustainability and my Business and Human Rights courses.

But as business professors, I’m not sure that we spend enough time talking about business ethics. Yes, it’s important to know about conflicts of interests but do we know how to advise our business clients on the issues that affect them?

I get to flex my “ethics” muscles in an interdisciplinary Innovation, Technology, and Design program housed in our School of Engineering, where I teach a course on Ethics, Equity, and Responsibility- basically Ethics and Technology.

They say grading is the worst part of being a professor.

But not this week.

My students in the ITD class brought me to tears reading their final exams.

I was impressed by their projects on regulating technologies like social media, cloning, AI, and robotics, and by their business plans and pitches for new innovations.

I would invest in some of them today if…

People rarely keep resolutions, much less ones they don’t make for themselves, but here are some you may want to try.

  1. Post information about the law and current events that lay people can understand on social media. You don’t need to be a TikTok lawyer and dance around, but there’s so much misinformation out there by “influencers” that lawyers almost have a responsibility to correct the record.
  2. Embrace legal tech. Change is scary for most lawyers, but we need to get with the times, and you can start off in areas such as legal research, case management, accounting, billing, document automation and storage, document management, E-discovery, practice management, legal chatbots, automaton of legal workflow, contract management, artificial intelligence, and cloud-based applications. Remember, lawyers have an ethical duty of technological competence.
  3. Learn about legal issues related to the metaverse such as data privacy and IP challenges.
  4. Do a data security audit and ensure you understand where your and your clients’ data is and how it’s being transmitted, stored, and destroyed. Lawyers have access to valuable confidential information and hackers know that. Lawyers also have ethical obligations to safeguard that information. Are you communicating with clients on WhatsApp

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A few weeks ago, Tim Carney wrote a piece in the Washington Examiner that is stuck in my mind. The piece titled Conservatives, big government and the duty to care for the poor discusses what Carney sees as a shift in the rhetoric conservatives are using in reference to the poor and other vulnerable populations.  Carney notes that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) recently referenced a “shared responsibility for the weak.”  Carney continues:

Step away from policy debates and think about that phrase. Do you have a responsibility to help the weak? Do you have a responsibility to feed the hungry? To aid the poor?

 I think I do. I think everyone does. The Catholic Church teaches us we do.

Conservatives sometimes shy away from this idea, though. One reason is a strong (and overblown) distaste to “helping the lazy.” Another reason is that conservatives fear it implies the Left’s answer: big federal programs.

But, in fact, you can grant that you have a duty to the poor and the weak, and then have a really good debate:

Is that duty individual, or some sort of a communal duty?

Does the government have the legitimate right to transfer wealth to satisfy

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