About

Lucian T. Pera is a partner with the Memphis, Tennessee, office of Adams and Reese LLP. His practice includes legal ethics, media law, and commercial litigation. He represents lawyers, law firms, and others on issues of legal ethics and lawyer professional responsibility.

The ABA Center for Professional Responsibility recently bestowed on him the prestigious Michael Franck Award, their highest award for work in the field of ethics and professional responsibility over his career.

A Memphis native, he is a graduate of Princeton University and Vanderbilt University School of Law and served as a law clerk for U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Harry W. Wellford. Pera joined Adams and Reese in 2006 to help open the firm’s Memphis office, after practicing law for 20 years with Armstrong Allen, PLLC.

As a part of his national practice in the ethics field, Pera represents and advises attorneys, law firms, their clients, and businesses who deal with lawyers about all aspects of the law governing lawyers. Recent assignments have included defense of lawyers in disciplinary investigation, counseling clients with disciplinary and other claims against lawyers, advising law firms about loss prevention and claims, and defending and prosecuting motions to disqualify lawyers or for sanctions. Pera regularly provides expert witness testimony in matters concerning legal ethics, professional responsibility and the standard of care for lawyers and law firms. He also advises businesses seeking to do business with lawyers about how they may do so legally and ethically. He writes and speaks frequently, both nationally and in Tennessee, on legal ethics and professional responsibility and media law.

He served for five years on the ABA “Ethics 2000” Commission, which rewrote the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. From 1995 through 2009, he led the TBA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility. Under his leadership, the committee developed and successfully proposed to the Tennessee Supreme Court new legal ethics rules for Tennessee based on the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct.

Pera has served as president of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers (APRL), the national membership organization of lawyers who work in the legal ethics arena. He has chaired and served as a member of the editorial board of the ABA/BNA Lawyers’ Manual on Professional Conduct, has chaired ethics committees for the Media Law Resource Center and the ABA Business Law Section, and serves as a member of the Advisory Board for the Miller-Becker Institute for Professional Responsibility of the University of Akron. He has chaired the governing board of the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility.

He is a member of the American Law Institute, the American Bar Foundation, and is recognized in The Best Lawyers in America in the areas of First Amendment Law, Ethics and Professional Responsibility Law, Commercial Litigation, Health Care Law, and Legal Malpractice Law.

Pera is a past Treasurer of the American Bar Association, has served in the ABA House of Delegates since 1990, and has served three terms on the ABA Board of Governors, currently representing the Business Law Section on the Board. He is also a past President of the Tennessee Bar Association.