Regulation of the Legal Profession · 6-12% of the exam
3.3.3Law-related (ancillary) services (Rule 5.7)
Adjacent services such as title work, financial planning, and accounting sit alongside legal work in many practices. Clients naturally assume attorney-client protections follow them across that threshold; they don't of their own force, and Rule 5.7 names the two situations in which the Model Rules follow anyway.
Rule 5.7 extends the Model Rules to law-related services on either of two triggers, and the second one reaches services the lawyer has kept entirely distinct from legal work.
Why
A client who walks from a lawyer's legal advice into that same lawyer's title, planning, or accounting service rarely sees the line being crossed, and keeps assuming the protections came along. Rule 5.7 puts the cost of that confusion on the lawyer, who is the one in a position to prevent it.
Plain English
The Model Rules govern a lawyer's law-related services when either trigger is present: the services are provided in circumstances not distinct from the lawyer's legal services, or they come through an entity controlled by the lawyer individually or with others, and the lawyer has not taken reasonable measures to inform recipients that these are not legal services and carry no client-lawyer protections.
Rule 5.7 — Responsibilities Regarding Law-Related Services
The Model Rules govern law-related services when either condition is met — two points, and the second carries an AND inside it:
- The services are provided in circumstances not distinct from the lawyer's legal services; or
- The services are provided through an entity
- controlled by the lawyer individually or with others, and
- the lawyer has not taken reasonable measures to inform recipients that the services are not legal services and do not carry client-lawyer protections
Example 1
Ex. 1
Ivan is a real-estate attorney who also owns a title company organized as a separate LLC. When a buyer client hires him for a closing, he recommends the title company in the same meeting where he reviews the purchase agreement, without disclosing the LLC as separate or warning that client-lawyer protections end there. Because Ivan controls the LLC and never made the separation clear, Rule 5.7 triggers and the Model Rules govern both engagements. You need both halves of condition two, and Ivan supplies both — control of the LLC, and no warning about where the protections end.
The exam treats a separate LLC as proof of distinctness; it isn't. The client's reasonable understanding controls: an entity operating from the same office and pitched as part of the same engagement is not distinct.
Tip
Questions · 1
Q 01ch03-e10
Question 1 of 1 · Rule 5.7(a)(1)
Attorney practices elder law and also offers a benefits-application service that prepares long-term-care paperwork for families. The service has no separate office, uses the same reception desk and the same staff, and is billed on the firm's letterhead. When a family comes in about a parent's estate plan, Attorney describes the legal work and the application service in the same meeting, as two parts of one engagement. Attorney never tells the family that the application work is not legal service or that the protections of a client-lawyer relationship do not extend to it. A dispute later arises over information the family gave the application staff. Which of the following is correct about the application service?
Keys 1 to 4 choose.