Adams and Reese attorney Lucian Pera, Partner in the firm’s Memphis office and Treasurer of the American Bar Association was interviewed in an ABA Journal article, “ABA Makes the Model Rules Available as a Mobile App,” published in the December 1st edition of the magazine.
The ABA Center for Professional Responsibility recently introduced its first app to make it possible for lawyers to download the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct to their mobile devices. Every state except California has adopted the format used by the Model Rules.
“I’ve got it right here on my iPhone,” says Pera. “It’s a nice, clean little app.” For CPR, which has a wealth of information on ethics and related topics available for digital sharing, “it’s a toe in the water,” he says.
But the Model Rules app is targeted toward a wider range of lawyers than those who take a specialized interest in ethics. The typical practitioner, says Pera, should have ready access to local rules of professional conduct, the Model Rules, ethics opinions and possibly a treatise or two. The benefit of apps, he says, is that those materials are accessible wherever the lawyer goes. “Then when something comes up,” he says, “you pull it up and you’ve got what you need.”
At Adams and Reese, Pera focuses his practice on commercial litigation, legal ethics and lawyer professional responsibility work, and media law. Pera writes and speaks frequently, both nationally and in Tennessee, on legal ethics and professional responsibility and media law, and conducts presentations and seminars for national audiences.
Pera serves as Treasurer of the American Bar Association, and has a long record of service to the profession having served on the ABA Board of Governors, in the ABA House of Delegates, and as a member of the Ethics 2000 Commission that revised the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which are now the model for the lawyer ethics rules in virtually every American jurisdiction. Pera also formerly chaired the ABA Board of Governors Finance Committee and the ABA Standing Committee on Technology and Information Systems, and has been a member of the ABA House of Delegates, primarily representing the Tennessee Bar Association, for all but three years since 1991.