Last month at the Pennsylvania Bar Institute’s Environmental Law Forum, over 100 environmental lawyers discussed the implications of the duty of competence imposed by Rule of Professional Conduct 1.1 on their practices in light of climate change. John Dernbach first posed the issue to the forum in a keynote address a year earlier. Dernbach later published those thoughts. Oddly, applying those thoughts to environmental practice is not obvious; this article tries to memorialize some of the group’s conversation about doing so.

Continue reading the full article, published by The Legal Intelligencer May 13, 2024. Reprinted with permission.