Attorney and Paralegal Ethics Codes Memorandum Guide

The single fact that organises this whole memorandum is a structural asymmetry: attorneys are regulated and paralegals largely are not. An attorney is licensed by a state supreme court or bar, bound by rules of professional conduct adopted as law in that state, and subject to a disciplinary process that can suspend or disbar. A paralegal in almost every state holds no licence, and the codes they follow — NALA's and NFPA's — are voluntary association standards whose strongest sanction is loss of membership or certification. Once you have that distinction, every part of the assignment follows from it: the codes differ because one is law and one is not, the investigation processes differ for the same reason, and the potential outcomes differ most of all. Say it in the memo's first substantive sentence rather than letting the reader infer it, since a committee deciding where to send three reports needs the distinction before it needs the detail.

That asymmetry answers the first required element more sharply than a side-by-side comparison of canons would. Attorney rules address the practice of law directly — competence, confidentiality, conflicts, candour to the tribunal, fees, supervision of non-lawyer assistants. Paralegal codes address a narrower and differently shaped problem: they are preoccupied with the boundary of the unauthorised practice of law, with disclosure of paralegal status so nobody mistakes you for a lawyer, and with the fact that the paralegal's ethical duties run partly through the supervising attorney. Naming that shape — codes written around a boundary rather than around a practice — is stronger than listing canons in parallel columns. A useful test while drafting is whether a duty you are describing protects the client, the court, or the profession's boundary — the attorney rules do all three, the paralegal codes concentrate heavily on the third.

The supervision link is the mechanism the memorandum needs and it is what makes reporting a paralegal meaningful at all. Attorney rules make the supervising lawyer responsible for a non-lawyer assistant's conduct where the lawyer ordered it, ratified it, or knew of it and failed to act. So misconduct by a paralegal is frequently prosecuted as misconduct by the attorney who supervised them. For a committee deciding where to report, that is the practical answer: the route with teeth usually runs through the attorney, and a report naming only the paralegal may reach a body with no power to do anything. It also answers the brief's question about further involvement by the firm: the firm is not a bystander to a supervision failure, and its own policies and oversight may be examined alongside the individual's conduct.

The second element asks for the investigation process for the governing bodies in *your state*, which means this is a research task with a jurisdiction attached rather than a general description. The attorney side is findable: your state bar or supreme court disciplinary authority publishes its process, and the typical sequence runs from complaint through screening, investigation, a probable cause or grievance panel, formal charges, hearing and recommendation, with the court imposing discipline. Get your own state's terminology right, because a memorandum that describes a generic process while naming a specific firm reads as though the research was skipped. Note also that a complaint is usually confidential until formal charges are filed, which affects what the committee can say internally while an investigation runs. Say too what happens to a complaint that is dismissed at screening, since a committee that expects a hearing and gets a closure letter needs to know that in advance.

The paralegal side of that question has an answer many students miss because they assume symmetry: in most states there is no governing body for paralegals at all. Where a paralegal belongs to NALA or NFPA, the association can investigate and can withdraw certification or membership; where they belong to neither, there is no forum. A handful of states have registration or certification schemes with more substance, and a few have specific statutes on the unauthorised practice of law that can reach a paralegal directly. Saying plainly that the committee may find there is nowhere to report the paralegal is a real finding, and a memorandum that invents a disciplinary body would be worse than one that reports its absence. The unauthorised practice statutes are the exception worth checking carefully, because where they exist they reach the paralegal directly and are enforced by the state rather than by an association.

The judge is the third target and takes a third route entirely, which is easy to lose in a memo organised around attorneys and paralegals. Judicial conduct is handled by a separate commission or board in each state, under a code of judicial conduct rather than the rules of professional conduct, with its own complaint process and its own sanctions up to removal. If the committee's decision covers a judge, the memorandum has to say where that report goes and on what standard, because sending it to the bar's attorney discipline office would simply delay it. Sanctions there run from private admonishment through censure and suspension to removal from office, and the standard of proof and confidentiality rules typically differ from the attorney process. Name the commission in your state explicitly rather than describing it generically, because the whole point of this element is that the committee needs an address to send the report to.

Format carries real marks here because this is a legal writing exercise as much as an ethics one. The brief specifies a memorandum to the ethics committee with named sections — heading or caption, facts, issues presented, answer to issue, reasoning or discussion, conclusion — and that structure is not decoration. Facts are what happened, stated neutrally and without argument. Issues are framed as questions. The answer is short and comes *before* the reasoning, which is the opposite of an essay and the thing most students get backwards. Reasoning does the work. Conclusion states what the committee should do. Keep each section labelled with its own heading, since the committee is described as new and a memo that models the form is more useful to them than one that merely follows it. Where the facts are contested, say so in the facts section rather than resolving them, since a memorandum that quietly picks a version has done the committee's job for it.

The source requirement is specific and worth reading closely: at least three primary legal sources including case law, as well as citations to the ethical rules for both paralegals and attorneys. Primary means the law itself — statutes, court rules, decided cases — not a law review article or a bar association explainer, which are secondary. Case law means a decided case you cite properly, and unauthorised practice and supervision cases are the natural place to look. The codes are cited separately and in addition. All of this in one to two pages, which means the memorandum has to be dense rather than discursive. Cite in a recognised legal citation format throughout, because a memorandum for an ethics committee that gets its citations wrong undermines the authority it is trying to establish. One to two pages also means the reasoning section will not fit all three respondents at equal length, so decide which of the three the committee most needs guidance on and weight accordingly.