Law Firm Risk Management Blog has a post reporting that ACC will be asking the ABA to modernize the rules' treatment of sophisticated clients. The ACC's upcoming postion will be broadly aligned with the recent presentation from big firm GC's and risk managers -- although it's not clear that the GC's and the ACC will offer 100% identical positions.
A statement by the ACC should have a huge impact. The rules are supposed to protect clients and if the ACC -- whose members are the core of the biglaw clients -- asks for modernization, then one would hope the rules-writers would get the point. On a number of issues, including advance waivers, prospectively limiting professional liability, disaggregation, and MDP, the current rules structure forbids clients from making choices that give them access to counsel and that hold down costs. (One major rationale for those expensive rules is that we need them to protect unsophisticated clients and that, supposedly, there is no way to write rules to distinguish between the two kinds of clients. One suspects that there is also a touch of resentment directed at big firms for wanting to receive "special treatment." That comes through in the article linked above.)