— Fred Smart, General Counsel, Dearborn & Clark, LLP


Reputation at Risk is an arresting and effective teaching tool designed for use by law firm General Counsel, risk management and loss control partners and ethics counsel. It has been designed to enhance firms' — and individual lawyers' — compliance with risk management policies and procedures.

The product consists of five professionally produced video vignettes, each lasting five to ten minutes and containing several story lines based on real professional liability claims, professional discipline complaints and other reputation threatening events from within law firms. Accompanying the vignettes is a course book offering detailed suggestions on how to lead discussion of the issues portrayed and citing to relevant revisions of the ethics rules, case law and other sources of the law governing lawyers.

Taken together, the materials comprising Reputation at Risk are designed to enable firms to provide cost effective training on their own policies and procedures and avoid the pitfalls displayed on screen in the vignettes. The topics covered by the scenarios were originally selected for their relevance by the General Counsels' Roundtable, a group of highly experienced lawyers who meet under the aegis of the Hildebrandt Institute.



To order the DVD, please click here.

1. Trouble.
Jim Smith, a lawyer specialising in the tax aspects of real estate transactions, is being courtedby Dearborn & Clark’s competitors. He is swiftly hired to the firm’s Milwaukee office but the apparent coup soon backfires.

2. A Plateful of Conflicts.
Newly appointed Dearborn & Clark general counsel Fred Smart finds himself up to his neck in conflict issues and at loggerheads with the head of the corporate law practice, Sherman Jones.

3. We Represent Who? And Where?
"He clearly has no understanding of business" says an exasperated Sherman Jones of Fred Smart, as Smart pushes him to secure a client’s consent to a newly discovered conflict that could imperil the firm’s involvement in a large joint venture deal. But the deal proves murkier than expected.

4. New Clients - the More the Merrier.
Dearborn & Clark’s merger with a London-based law firm generates confusion as to which rules should govern new client intake.

5. We're all High-Tech Here.
The speed with which social media stories can go viral takes Dearborn & Clark by surprise.




Reputation at Risk is a collaborative venture between the Hildebrandt Institute, a business of law research and executive education division of Thomson Reuters; the Lawyers for the Profession® practice group of Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP, which advises lawyers and law firms on all aspects of the "law governing lawyers"; and Beazley Group, a leading underwriter of lawyers' professional liability insurance.