In the first column I discussed the Rules of Professional Conduct (RPC) that assist in providing the basics for understanding a lawyer's responsibility to the profession or the system and to his clients.

My experience has been that most clients understand that a lawyer is obligated to work within the system, even to change the system. A lawyer is dedicated to preserving the system because it is through the system, flawed though it may be, that the client's ultimate interests can be best served.

This may be altruistic, but a lawyer must have total dedication to the concept or he is in the wrong profession.

Let's try to "hit a few high spots" about loyalty to the system and what you should expect from your lawyer.

Canon I of the RPC requires a lawyer to assist in maintaining the integrity and competence of the legal profession. The canon, among other things, requires a lawyer, having knowledge of same, to report serious instances of misconduct of other lawyers. One can see that is in the public good.

However, some portions of the RPC may appear to the non-lawyer to be designed to protect lawyers from each other rather than to protect their clients from them.

Consider the tortured history of lawyer advertising, regulated by Canon II. For many years it was unethical for a lawyer to advertise for legal services. Today one only has to open his mail after getting a traffic ticket to receive a direct solicitation for legal representation.

That is not unethical so long as the letter is not misleading and the envelope states on the outside that it is an advertisement for legal services.

Just about the only prohibition left is direct personal contact with no prior personal, family or professional relationship to serve as a conversation opener.

The United States Supreme Court, in allowing lawyers to advertise, reasoned that the public would benefit as a result of legal services becoming better known and more available. Lawyer advertising would also have the effect to increase competition among lawyers.

I would suggest that lawyers have always advertised; it is just that some of the methods have changed. It used to be (and things never were as good as they used to be) that a lawyer became known solely by running for public office, doing church or civic club work or writing a column in the newspaper.

My grandfather worked as a trolley car conductor in Wilmington around the turn of the century while he was reading for the bar, taught Sunday school and served in the legislature in 1911.

Much of the old-fashioned advertising is still being done. But one place where you will find fewer lawyers than there used to be is in the legislature. I will not bore you with figures or debate whether this is good or bad. However, my observation is that the fewer lawyers that are in the legislature, the more laws get gassed that create even more work for the lawyers.

When I worked in the 1961 Session of the General Assembly, it seemed to me that the most important work the lawyers did was remind their fellow legislators that there was already a law on the books to do that or the idea was a well-intentioned, but improper, encroachment on the rights of the citizens by explaining the consequences.

Now the lawyers argue over the consequences of bad legislation in the courthouse, rather in the legislature, at great cost to the public.

The difference today is that many lawyers just bypass the public-service route and get straight to the point by buying an ad. Even the large firms have sophisticated marketing departments and purchase tombstone ads in various cultural and business publications.

However, if you look around the community today, you still will find a disproportionate number of lawyers active in civic clubs, the chamber of commerce, churches and the United Way, generously giving their time to the community. The old habits of public service must be hard to break. Canon II essentially requires a lawyer to assist in making legal counsel available. Advertising, and its regulation, is supposed to promote that end.

Under Cannon III, lawyers are charged with a duty to prevent non-lawyers from practicing law. Cynics may observe that lawyers have an obvious self-interest in reserving as much of the law business for themselves as is profitable.

However, the reasoning here is that the public should have some protection from unskilled and dishonest people passing themselves off as lawyers or as capable of doing legal work. This does make basic good sense. Besides, doctors, dentists and contractors are regulated by doctors, dentists and contractors for the public good, so why not lawyers?

However, there is not now, nor has there ever been, a prohibition against one doing his own legal work. It is only when you are doing legal work for a third party that the lawyers might get after you. You can even do the legal work for your corporate employer without having a law license. The directors and shareholder might raise hell if you lose or screw up, but there is nothing illegal about it.

There is a rather strange twist about not having to be a lawyer to represent your corporate employer. Even if you are a lawyer, if you are a full-time employee of the corporation, you may not ethically represent another corporate employee and your corporate employer in the same lawsuit.

If you were a lawyer in private practice, so long as you overcome the hurdles of conflicts of interest, you can represent both. The distinction in North Carolina goes off on the basis that the North Carolina statute that prohibits a corporation from engaging in the practice of law prohibits a full-time employee of a corporation from providing legal services to any person other than his employer as a part of his corporate employment.

Needless to say, this result offends many corporations and their house counsel. When the rule is applied to county welfare departments, which are municipal corporations, and the welfare department attorney cannot also appear for the social worker in a hearing or the city attorney cannot defend both the city and the council members or city manager individually when they are sued over a civil rights violation or something of that sort, you can bet the legislature will be called on to make some changes.

The lawyer's duty to the system, strangely enough, requires the lawyer to let a non-lawyer do his own legal brain surgery, but also requires the lawyer to let the non-lawyer know that there are better alternatives.

Toolbox Point: Do your own brain surgery, if you like, but look out.

Next time: some problems that are inherent in a lawyer having more than one client and correspondingly have only one client.

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This article first appeared in the April 12,1996 edition of Triad Business News.