LawPulse

The ISBA’s online archive of professional conduct advisory opinions enhanced for easier navigation.

The ISBA’s online archive of professional conduct advisory opinions dating back to 1980 has been made more accessible and easier to navigate. The association will officially launch the enhancements this April.

Up until February, when the ISBA soft-launched the improvements, advisory opinions were archived as PDF files that were difficult for people who use assistive technology to read. The archive also relied on a basic organizational scheme that could make finding relevant opinions challenging.

Now, advisory opinions are uniformly formatted and in ways that accommodate assistive technology like screen readers. Advisory opinions also include hyperlinks to related opinions and relevant Illinois Rules of Professional Conduct (IRPC). The font size of the opinions can be easily increased and decreased, and the HTML-formatted text can adapt to different screen sizes and modes (e.g., dark mode) and will be more easily detected by internet search engines. Other improvements include linking to opinions by name rather than number.

Labor-intensive, ongoing effort

The beginning of the project dates back to November 2021 when ISBA staff began an audit of PDF files available on its website, isba.org. The initial intention was to assess the accessibility of content on the website; this effort was part of a larger project to improve document accessibility throughout the association.

“Converting these opinions to HTML would not only allow us to make these opinions more accessible, but more usable for everyone. The challenge with this project, however, was that we had to manually update each opinion, which is very labor intensive,” says Doug Knapp, the ISBA’s director of electronic communications.

The ISBA’s accessibility initiatives have been overseen by a disability inclusion working group of staff and members of the ISBA Standing Committee on Disability Law. The group meets regularly to discuss accessibility improvement projects and other topics of inclusion.

A public service

While the ISBA’s advisory opinions are not binding, courts and disciplinary agencies consult them during their deliberations. The opinions address dozens of topics and rely on a mixture of practical examples and analysis of the IRPC, ethics opinions from courts and bar associations around the country, and other authorities. The ISBA’s advisory-opinion online archive is visited thousands of times a year.

The ISBA Standing Committee on Professional Conduct oversees the writing of advisory opinions and receives requests from ISBA members and groups, as well as from an ethics hotline and an online form attorneys and the public can use to submit ethics questions. Advisory opinions are not published until they are approved by the ISBA Board of Governors.

“The ISBA’s online archive of advisory opinions has been significantly enhanced, making these opinions much more accessible to Illinois attorneys and the public, and therefore more widely useful,” says Barry Mortge, chair of the ISBA Standing Committee on Professional Conduct and a business and real estate attorney in Buffalo Grove. “The ISBA’s advisory opinions are a one-of-a-kind resource that provide insight and analysis on specific questions of legal ethics and that, hopefully, provide some practical insight on how lawyers might best be able to honor the Rules. They certainly deserve greater visibility.”

The ISBA’s advisory opinions archive is available at isba.org/ethics, the launching pad for numerous ethics resources provided by the association and other Illinois legal authorities and agencies.

Pete Sherman is managing editor of the Illinois Bar Journal.
psherman@isba.org