J. Donald and Va Lena Scarpelli Curran Faculty Chair in Legal Ethics and Professionalism
Visiting Associate Professor
E-mail
509-313-3744
Office #417
Assistant: Barb Anderson
Education
- J.D. Rutgers Law School – Newark; Research Editor, Rutgers Law Review
- B.A. Rutgers College; Honors, Phi Beta Kappa
Biography
Kevin Michels examines legal ethics, professionalism and liability questions in his teaching and research. Prior to joining academia, he practiced corporation and business law for twenty years, and served as counsel, consultant and expert on matters involving attorney ethics and liability. His scholarship includes:
- Third Party Negligence Claims Against Counsel: A Proposed Unified Liability Standard, 22 Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 143 (2009) (proposing a new standard by which to analyze claims against counsel based on relation between tort theory and attorney-ethics rules).
- Internal Corporate Investigations and the Truth, 40 Seton Hall Law Review 83 (2010) (looking to corporation law, legal ethics and philosophy to identify the core truth commitments of counsel who conduct internal corporate investigations).
- Lawyer Independence: From Ideal to Viable Legal Standard, 61 Case Western Reserve Law Review 85 (2010) (arguing that lawyer independence in counseling clients, which is expressly required by the attorney-ethics rules and largely overlooked in the Restatement and case law, can challenge our core assumptions about client autonomy and reduce corporate wrongdoing).
- What Conflicts Can Be Waived? A Unified Understanding of Competence and Consent, 65 Rutgers Law Review __ (forthcoming Fall 2012) (developing a new legal standard by which to identify attorney conflicts of interest that clients should not be allowed to waive under the Rules of Professional Conduct).
He is also the author of New Jersey Attorney Ethics (Gann 2012), a comprehensive treatise on the law of lawyering in New Jersey, now in its twelfth edition, which has been cited in the published opinions of state and federal courts in New Jersey.
Professor Michels received his B.A. with honors from Rutgers College, where he was a Henry Rutgers Scholar and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and he received his J.D. from Rutgers Law School-Newark, where he was Research Editor of the Rutgers Law Review. He served as law clerk for Justice Robert L. Clifford of the New Jersey Supreme Court, for the 1986-87 term, and began practice as an associate in the corporate law group of what is now the Day Pitney firm, and later founded and served as director of Michels & Hockenjos, P.C. He served on the New Jersey Supreme Court Commission on the Rules of Professional Conduct, which advised the Court on the 2004 revision of the attorney-ethics rules. He has lectured on legal ethics for the New Jersey Judicial College, the New Jersey Corporate Counsel Association, the New Jersey Institute on Continuing Legal Education, New Jersey’s in-house corporation counsel, bar associations, and in a variety of other settings. He is included in the current edition of The Best Lawyers in America in the area of Ethics and Professional Responsibility Law. He was recently elected to the American Law Institute. Professor Michels comes to Gonzaga from The College of New Jersey, where he is a tenured Associate Professor and the recipient of two teaching awards.
