Carol Langford

Carol M. Langford is a lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area. She specializes in giving advice on legal ethics and discipline to attorneys, judges, law firms, and corporations, and in representing lawyers and law students before the California State Bar in disciplinary and admissions matters. She serves as a national expert witness in the ethics area. She was formerly a partner in the Walnut Creek office of the international law firm of Carroll, Burdick & McDonough, where she was ethics advisor to the firm and a member of the new business committee.

Langford has devoted a considerable amount of her time to training lawyers in issues involving law practice management. She has also co-written two books: a nationally adopted textbook entitled Legal Ethics in the Practice of Law, 4th Edition (Lexis Law Publishing, 2014) and The Moral Compass of the American Lawyer, Truth, Justice, Power and Greed (Ballantine,1999).

In addition to her practice, she served as chair of the ethics committee of the American Bar Association Intellectual Property Section. She is the first person in California history to be elected chair of three committees/sections of the California State Bar. She was the chair of the Law Practice Management & Technology Committee of the State Bar of California and chair of the Council of Section Chairs. She also served as the chair and special advisor to the California State Bar Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct, and has taught ethics as an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law since 1992 and currently teaches at the UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law. She has lectured and presented programs on ethics for the California State Bar, local bar associations, the Institute of Internal Auditors, PLI, University of San Francisco School of the Law, Hastings College of the Law, and Lawyer’s Mutual Insurance Company. Langford was the ethics consultant to the Judicial Council of California, and was a member of the Mandatory Fee Arbitration Committee of the State Bar of California.

She is a member of the California and Washington, D.C. state bars. She recently was appointed to the Commission for the Revision of the Rules of Professional Conduct and served on the Disciplinary Standards Task Force where she was chair of the Drafting Subcommittee.

She has won a Woman of the Year award from the Senate and the Contra Costa County Commission on Women for “Women Who Seek Justice,” and the Lichtenstein Distinguished Professorship of Legal Ethics Award from Hofstra University Law School in New York.

• BA, San Diego State University
• JD, University of San Francisco