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The New World of

 A fresh look at ethics that will help you in your legal and corporate practice.

Here on the site we look at

• the new combined legal/social ethical framework in which lawyers work
• the new way in which lawyers must perceive ethics as a subject of study
• new ethics rules and refinements that respond to this framework and perception

Neoethics is a new word --- a fresh idiom --- for a necessary modern approach to legal ethics. We use this new word to give emphasis to what now exists in current news and views of legal and corporate ethics.  This century has brought a changed complex of social, cultural, and business conditions affecting the nature of the legal ethics (1) an individual lawyer must follow and (2) the legal community must embrace.

We as lawyers are socially and politically adept. We know that social and cultural  changes have occurred since Enron, WorldCom and 9-11.  But we lawyers do not sufficiently understand the nature of the “new legal ethics” which have followed the social and cultural changes of the last half dozen years.

My dictionary gives me two main definitions of the word ethics:

1.         Ethics.  The study of the general nature of morals and of the specific moral choices to be made by a person; moral philosophy.

2.         Ethics.  The rules or standards governing the conduct of a person or the members of a profession.

Neoethics exists because of the merging of these two dictionary definitions.  Moral philosophy and the standards governing lawyers are merging, as they never have before.  The public and government now demand something from lawyers that courts and lawyers themselves have not demanded.  The public and government demand that the legal rules governing lawyers’ conduct  respond to the public perception of the moral choices lawyers and corporate officers should make.

This is a “new ethics”  (neoethics) requirement  for private practice lawyers and corporate counsel: Lawyers must act both in accord with a contemporary public morality and also in accord with the lawyer-generated professional set of rules. The penalties for violating this contemporary Neoethics requirement are both new and substantial.  They affect both individual lawyers and the entire legal system as a social institution.

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