I would like to thank John Steele and Renee Knake for encouraging me to be a guest blogger here--I've been a fan of The Legal Ethics Forum for quite awhile! I hope to post more in the future about my current research on offshore legal outsourcing. For this post, however, I wanted to let people know about a fantastic opportunity for law students and young lawyers interested in legal ethics. The annual Levit Essay Contest is co-sponsored by the ABA Standing Committee on Lawyers' Professional Liability and the law firm of Long & Levit, LLP. It carries a $5,000 cash prize plus an expenses-paid invitation to attend the spring committee meeting. Each year, the contest focuses on cutting-edge issues regarding lawyers' professional liability.
This year's topic is "whether a party who has engaged in fraud has standing to bring a suit against a lawyer for fraud and legal malpractice based on the lawyer’s conduct relating to the fraud itself, or rather if such a claim is barred by the doctrine of in pari delicto, which prohibits one wrongdoer from suing another wrongdoer for a fraud the two parties committed together." The full hypothetical is available here.