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Amy H. Soled
Abstract: Effective advocacy requires telling a client’s story so that the factfinder finds in the client’s favor. Early in law school, students learn the importance of storytelling, and the ability to create a client narrative is an integral part of the legal profession itself. There are times, however, where attorneys should withhold the narrative, and one such occasion are hearings concerning attorney discipline. The primary purpose of attorney discipline is to instill faith and trust in the legal profession. By minimizing an attorney’s accountability, the story undermines this primary objective. There has been scholarship on the importance of storytelling, how and why it works. And there has been scholarship on the ethics of storytelling in terms of truthfulness and whether the client has input in the story being told. No scholarship, however, has assessed the role the narrative plays in attorney ethics hearings or whether the narrative should even serve a role. This article addresses this question and finds that narratives should play only a limited role in attorney ethics hearings. Specifically, they can and do serve a role in terms of sanctions and challenges to the ethical rules themselves. But when it comes to defending clients accused of violating their professional ethics, attorneys should refrain from introducing the narrative. In cases when attorneys are charged with ethical misconduct, the story—character, problem, resolution—do not matter. Why what happened happened is irrelevant and tarnishes the reputation of the legal profession, defeating the goal of the attorney ethics system itself.