Poster Presentation: Ethical Guardrails and the Use of Case Studies

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Session Type: Poster Presentation

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Lawyers know how to tell a good story and are expected, encouraged, and even ethically required to use that skill on behalf of their clients. More and more, lawyers and legal academics are now using their clients’ stories to advance goals that go far beyond achieving a client’s objectives: exposing inequities with regard to access to justice; educating the public about the functioning and limitations of the legal system; raising the quality of lawyering; and improving our system of legal education. Unfortunately, the increase in the use of case histories to achieve such laudable goals has not consistently been paired with an increase in the self-reflection and deep analysis required to ensure case histories are used in a responsible and ethical manner. It is the interplay between these values—the improvement of the legal system and the protection of client confidentiality—that is the focus of this poster. The poster describes the extent and nature of the problem through a visual display of the results of a detailed survey we conducted of scholars who have included case histories in their publications, and the methods they used or did not use in addressing these issues. A variety of charts will illustrate, among other things, how frequently authors sought consent, what the informed consent consisted of, and how frequently authors used “disguise” to protect client confidentiality. In addition, our poster includes a protocol that we recommend for authors when considering the use of case studies in a publication. We hope our protocol provides a starting point for a concrete methodology that can be employed by authors as they assess how to use case studies to transform the legal system while adhering to the guardrails of lawyers’ ethical responsibilities to their clients.