Originally from: AAA Handbook on Arbitration Practice

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As more and more national and international businesses expand their use of mediation and arbitration, attorneys representing these entities find themselves traveling from state to state representing their client in ADR proceedings.

In the past, state regulation of the practice of law had not kept up with this rapidly changing expansion in the use of ADR proceedings by companies doing business throughout the United States. Most states were slow to make their own legal ethics rules more flexible in permitting out-of-state attorneys to appear intermittently on behalf of clients in mediation and arbitration without becoming licensed in those jurisdictions.  To remedy this situation, the American Bar Association (“ABA”) made important additions to its Model Rules of Professional Conduct (“Model Rules”) for states to consider concerning the multijurisdictional practice of law.  This article concerns only one aspect of the multijurisdictional practice of law—the circumstances when a lawyer admitted to practice in one state, occasionally appears in another state to represent a party in a private arbitration.