Engagement Letters
A Guide for Practitioners
Third Edition (2017) (PDF)
For use with the ACTEC Commentaries on the Model
Rules of Professional Conduct, Fifth Edition 2016
With the publication of the Fifth Edition of the ACTEC Commentaries, ACTEC – through the work of its Professional Responsibility Committee and with the financial support of the ACTEC Foundation – is now publishing the Third Edition of Engagement Letters. The Third Edition builds on the initial editions by updating the forms and checklists to address the latest version of the Model Rules and modern challenges to a lawyer’s ethical responsibilities, to respond to other changes in the law, and to provide cross references to the latest edition of the ACTEC Commentaries. In addition, this Third Edition includes checklists and forms that address a variety of engagement scenarios that were not dealt with in the prior Edition, and offers additional drafting options. The goal of these changes is to assist lawyers in providing ethical services to clients based on a family-oriented practice model, to demonstrate how trust and estate lawyers can use engagement letters to promote competent and ethical representation of their clients, to increase the utility and value of the engagement letters and checklists, and to provide an improved resource for the bench and bar, and a better tool for law schools in teaching ethics.
The “Engagement Letters: A Guide for Practitioners”
includes hyperlinks to Word versions of each letter.