Attorney Lucian T. Pera, a partner in the Memphis office of Adams and Reese, has been appointed to chair the governing body of the American Bar Association’s Center for Professional Responsibility, the umbrella group that is home to the ABA’s legal ethics and lawyer discipline work.
For more than a hundred years, the ABA has provided national leadership on legal and judicial ethics and lawyer regulation. Created in 1978, the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility is comprised of the Association’s five standing committee that work in the arena of lawyer ethics and regulation, as well as several other groups that further the ABA’s work on legal ethics.
The Center’s ethics committee, for example, issues the ABA’s formal ethics opinions that give guidance to lawyers on their conduct under the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which are the basis of the ethics rules in almost every American jurisdiction. The Center and its committees provide leadership and guidance by developing, interpreting and promoting implementation of policies and standards that govern the conduct of lawyers and judges and the regulation of the legal profession.
Pera will chair the Center’s Coordinating Council, which oversees and directs the policies and programs of the Center and facilitates in-depth strategic discussions on legal and judicial ethics and regulation issues that come before the ABA’s policymaking body, the ABA House of Delegates, and on other important national initiatives. Members of the Council include chairs of five ABA Standing Committees including Ethics and Professional Responsibility, Professionalism, Professional Regulation, Client Protection, and Specialization; chairs of Center policy and program committees; and liaisons from affiliated organizations including the National Organization of Bar Counsel, Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers and the National Client Protection Organization.
Pera’s practice with Adams and Reese includes civil trial work, including commercial litigation and media law, and he counsels and represents lawyers, law firms, and others on questions of legal ethics and the professional responsibility of lawyers. He is also the immediate past Treasurer of the ABA, a former member of its Board of Governors and Executive Committee, and has served in the House of Delegates since 1990. He also serves as Vice President of the Tennessee Bar Association and will be its President in 2017.
A Memphis native, he is an honors graduate of Princeton University and Vanderbilt University School of Law. He served for five years on the ABA “Ethics 2000” Commission, which rewrote the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. From 1995 through 2009, he led the Tennessee Bar Association Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility. Under his leadership, the committee developed and successfully proposed to the Tennessee Supreme Court new legal ethics rules for Tennessee based on the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct.
He has chaired the editorial board of the ABA/BNA Lawyers’ Manual on Professional Conduct, has served as president of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers, and serves as a member of the Advisory Board for the Miller-Becker Institute for Professional Responsibility of the University of Akron.