Practicing Across State Lines: Remote Work, Firm Footprints, and Avoiding Unauthorized Practice

Remote and hybrid practice are now permanent, and firms increasingly expect attorneys to handle matters tied to states where they are not admitted. Rule 5.5 was never built for this reality and remains a patchwork of inconsistent, state-specific requirements that leaves multistate firms and lawyers exposed. This program maps where the unauthorized-practice lines fall when work crosses jurisdictions. It addresses whether an attorney’s physical location alone creates risk, how matters governed by another state’s law change the analysis, and when a firm’s website disclosures, virtual offices, and client communications inadvertently signal practice where no one is admitted. It also addresses the supervisory responsibility questions that remote, multistate staffing raises under Rules 5.1 and 5.3. Attendees will leave with practical structures, including intake screening, local-counsel and pro hac vice protocols, disclosure language, and internal policies, designed to hold up if a multijurisdictional practice is ever questioned.

This session addresses how fast those lines are moving—and why the Rule 5.5 most lawyers trained under may not survive the decade. The consequences of getting multijurisdictional practice wrong remain serious, spanning discipline in every jurisdiction where a lawyer offers services under Rule 8.5, fee forfeiture, and potential criminal exposure, and that risk is precisely what is fueling a national reform movement. This session traces that movement from ABA Formal Opinion 495 on remote work through the growing roster of states that have amended their rules to expressly permit out-of-state lawyers to practice remotely from within their borders, to the proposals now on the table to replace Model Rule 5.5 altogether: APRL’s proposed rewrite permitting practice across jurisdictions with client disclosure and competence as the touchstones, and the ABA’s pending Issues Paper weighing competing disclosure-based models. It also situates Rule 5.5 reform within the broader re-regulation of legal services, regulatory sandboxes, alternative business structures, and new practitioner categories—that is reshaping who may deliver legal services and where. Attendees will leave understanding which reforms are likely to reach their states first, how the disclosure-based models would change day-to-day multistate practice, and what firms should build now so their structures work under both the current patchwork and the rules that replace it.