THE NHBA ETHICS Committee's top-to-bottom revision of the New Hampshire Rules of Professional Conduct is nearing completion, with drafts of most of the rules posted on the Bar's Web site. The Committee is seeking Bar member and public input on its work so far. Once comments are received, the committee will again review its drafts and incorporate necessary changes before submitting them to the NH Supreme Court's Advisory Committee on Rules, said Ethics Committee Co-chair Rolf Goodwin.

The Ethics Committee draft, with links to the current RPC and to the ABA's recently updated Model Rules of Professional Conduct, is posted under NH Practice Guidelines at http://www.nhbar.org/NHRules.asp?SectID=13&C=372 and is periodically updated with proposed new versions of rules as the committee finalizes them.

Also, the Summer 2004 issue of the New Hampshire Bar Journal, to be mailed this month, contains the Ethics Committee's draft-in-progress as of press time (mid-July) along with a roundtable discussion highlighting some of the significant rule changes. Participating in the discussion were Ethics Committee members Goodwin, Co-chair Linda Landis, Pierce Law professor Mitchell Simon, Honey Hastings and Bryan Gould.

Among the rules most recently posted are:

Rule 1.10: The committee has modified the general rule on conflicts of interest regarding conflicts within a law firm.

Rule 1.5: Two versions of the rule pertaining to fee-splitting are proposed by the committee, which was divided over the issue of retaining the current approach which requires involvement of the initial referring attorney or an approach which allows fee-splitting without significant participation in the case by the referring attorney.

Rule 3.8f: Adds clarifying language to the section regarding "extra-judicial statements" made to the press or the public by prosecutors or those associated with them in a criminal case.

Rule 4.3: Expands on rule regarding interactions with someone not represented by counsel, emphasizing that "the lawyer shall not give legal advice to an unrepresented person, other than the advice to secure counsel, if the lawyer knows...that the interests of such a person are...in conflict with the interests of the client."

Rule 5.5: Adds several exemptions to the unauthorized practice of law rules for lawyers admitted in other jurisdictions that temporarily are in New Hampshire's jurisdiction. This language closely tracks the proposed language of the ABA's Model Rules to account for the prevalence of multijurisdictional practice, particularly by in-house corporate counsel. The court's Rules Advisory Committee, however, has proposed a limited-license approach for such lawyers, which involves more regula tion.

Rule 5.7: A new section, titled "Responsibilities Regarding Law-Related Services" attempts to address uncertainty regarding "unbundling" or providing limited-scope services. It establishes a distinction between legal services and "law-related services" to allow a lawyer to provide "services that might reasonably be performed in conjunction with and, in substance, are related to the provision of legal services and that are not prohibited as unauthorized practice of law when provided by a non-lawyer." The lawyer must, however, take "reasonable measures to assure that a person obtaining the law-related services knows that the services are not legal services and that the protections of the client-lawyer relationship do not exist."

Rule 6.1: The Ethics Committee's version of the rule regarding pro bono obligation starts with the declaration, "Every lawyer has a professional responsibility to provide legal services to those unable to pay," that models a new ABA Model Rule, but it does not follow the ABA's approach of designating a specific aspirational number of hours of service to be provided annually.

At Bar News press time, the Ethics Committee had not finalized drafts of rules regarding advertising or a new Rule 6.5 regarding the provision of limited legal services through a nonprofit or court-annexed program, or Rule 8.4 elaborating on what constitutes "misconduct."

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