so how do legal departments work, let’s say in Microsoft or in US Army? Those organizations are not run by lawyers. So what sort of precise test does this rule use?
Notice that Darth Panda’s last post, if true, goes against your sweeping contention that a lawyer cannot take advantage of info generated by a non lawyer. Have the disbarment committees accumulated case law (heh…) illustrating what they do and do not in practice penalize?
Thanks for the interesting additional info.
Notice above that I never advocated full delegation of work. I have only wondered about the possibility of developing a methodology that would take advantage of work of employee P to speed up work of employee L in the specific area of legal search. Just because few L (lawyers) have historically been interested in achieving that it does not mean that it cannot be done.
The argument against this based on billing practices is a valid one, but perhaps it only refers to a single business model whereas other business models/strategies are possible as well. Perhaps a law firm may consider “number of cases handled per attorney per month” to be a metric to be optimized. After all, the attorney would still bill and get paid for the 16 * 5 hours per week (or maybe a lot more than that…) but being able to get more stuff done in that time may be a useful thing in itself.
E.g. maybe Bendini, Lambert and Locke would be interested in reducing the number of lawyers who know so much that they need to be blown up at sea in the Caribbean after getting a memorial scholarship established in their memory 
As I added in a later post, this rule applies to the provision of legal services, not to the internal operations of an organization.
I said no such thing.
Basically, a law firm - or a company providing legal services - cannot be owned by non-lawyers.
incidentally, why does it even matter practically? To make sure that if the company does something unlawyerly then the titular owner could be imprisoned for violating the lawyer regulations?
In terms of financial structuring, presumably there ought to exist ways to put a hypothetical law firm under control of an individual other than the owner (if the guy does not feel like getting a law degree for some reason, which reputedly is not all that hard).
If there were such a way, then one would expect to see it in practice. I don’t know of a single American law firm that is run by a non-lawyer.
A lot of the rules in place regrading legal ethics stem from the fact that the law is a mostly self-regulating profession and would like to keep it that way.
So the idea is largely based on the concept that the firm should be under the control of those who are aware of, bound by, and adherent to the rules of professional conduct.
There isn’t really any loophole in the rules that I am aware of - you have to keep in mind who is writing these things
ok that’s fine. Frankly I am not even sure, by now, why exactly the issue of who owns the companies that employ lawyers has come up in this thread.
Regardless of who owns whom, the nitty gritty of a lawyer’s workday can be studied with the view towards rationalization and productivity enhancement. E.g. there is already case management software, e-discovery and possibly other tools created to do things differently than how they were back in 1970. From what I can tell from Craigslist ads, the people doing e-discovery don’t even seem to need to be lawyers (or maybe there is a separate maintainer guy who is not lawyer while the actual user is lawyer).
I understand the argument about many firms’ lack of interest in productivity enhancement. But presumably, if let’s say case management tools got built and sold, some other firms or legal departments are more willing to experiment with the latest gadgets.