Jan L. Jacobowitz is a legal ethics, social media, and technology expert who is the founder and owner of Legal Ethics Advisor. Jan provides legal ethics consulting, expert testimony, opinion letters, and CLE training to law firms and legal organizations. Recently, she has been involved in cases involving issues such as attorney fees, conflicts of interest, and the unauthorized practice of law.
For over a decade, she was the Director of the Professional Responsibility and Ethics Program (PREP) at the University of Miami's School of Law. Under Jan’s direction, PREP was a 2012 recipient of the ABA’s E Smythe Gambrell Award---the leading national award for a professionalism program.
Jan is the immediate Past President of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers (APRL) and the co-chair of its Future of Lawyering Committee (FOL). As a co-chair of FOL, Jan participates in the ongoing national conversation concerning rethinking attorney regulation to address issues of access to legal services, the unauthorized practice of law, and lawyers partnering with nonlawyers.
Jan is also a member of APRL’s advertising committee and one of the co-authors of APRL’s 2015 Report on the Regulation of Lawyer Advertising and the Committee’s 2016 Supplemental Report, both of which laid the groundwork for the ABA’s recent revisions to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct pertaining to attorney advertising. Jan was previously APRL’s liaison to the ABA’s Standing Committee on Professionalism and served recently as the liaison to the ABA’s Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility. She was APRL’s 2019-2020 liaison to the ABA’s Center for Professional Responsibility Coordinating Counsel.
Jan is the co-author of the book, Legal Ethics And Social Media, A Practitioner's Handbook, and is among the first law school faculty throughout the country to teach Social Media and the Law.
Jan also co-developed and teaches Mindful Ethics: Professional Responsibility for Lawyers in the Digital Age, which served as the catalyst for the book that she co-authored, Mindfulness & Professional Responsibility—Incorporating Mindfulness into the Law School Curriculum.
Jan served as one of five members of the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and the Public Trust from 2018-2020. She was the Vice Chairman of Broward County’s Committee on Oversight of the Inspector General from 2011 until May 2018.
In 2018, Jan was nominated and then invited to become an American Bar Foundation Fellow, which is “a global honorary society of attorneys, judges, law faculty, and legal scholars whose public and private careers have demonstrated outstanding dedication to the highest principles of the legal profession and to the welfare of their communities. Membership in the Fellows is limited to one percent of lawyers licensed to practice in each jurisdiction. Fellows are recommended by their peers and elected by the Board of the American Bar Foundation.”
Jan has presented at hundreds of Ethics CLE Seminars and has been a featured speaker or panelist on topics such as Legal Ethics in Social Media and Advertising, Lawyer’s First Amendment Rights, Cultural Awareness in the Practice of Law, Cybersecurity, Mindful Ethics, Litigation Funding, eDiscovery, Conflicts of Interest, the Unauthorize Practice of Law, and Attorney Fees. She has also authored law review and journal articles in many of these areas.
Prior to devoting herself to legal education and legal ethics consulting, Jan practiced law for over twenty years. She began her career as a Legal Aid attorney in the District of Columbia; prosecuted Nazi war criminals at the Office of Special Investigations of the U.S. Department of Justice; and was in private practice with general practice and commercial litigation firms in Washington and Miami.
Jan has a J.D. from George Washington University and a B.S. in Speech from Northwestern University. She is an active member of the Florida Bar, the D.C. Bar and the California Bar. She is also a certified civil court mediator. Jan and her family have made South Florida their home for the past 35 years.