Professor Renee Knake Jefferson

Renee Knake Jefferson is a legal ethics expert witness and law professor specializing in lawyer discipline, judicial ethics, judicial recusal, and professional responsibility. She is widely recognized for bringing clarity, credibility, and institutional insight to high-stakes litigation involving attorney conduct, conflicts of interest, judicial ethics, and legal profession governance. Jefferson is the Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics and Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center. Her scholarship bridges legal doctrine, institutional design, and accountability within courts and the legal profession. A leading authority on lawyer discipline and judicial ethics, Jefferson has authored more than forty scholarly articles and five books, including a multi-volume treatise on Texas lawyer and judicial ethics and the award-winning book Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court. Her research has appeared in leading journals including the Michigan Law Review and Yale Law Journal Forum. Jefferson’s analysis of legal ethics controversies, judicial accountability, and professional responsibility enforcement has been featured in major media outlets including The New York Times, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. She has provided expert testimony on judicial ethics and professional responsibility matters before the United States Congress and twice before the Texas Supreme Court of Special Review. In litigation, Jefferson is frequently retained as an expert witness in cases involving attorney conflicts of interest, professional misconduct, disqualification motions, and legal malpractice claims. Her expert work has included the successful defense of an AmLaw 100 law firm in an $800 million legal malpractice action involving conflict-of-interest allegations, as well as the dismissal of a motion to disqualify the general counsel and in-house legal department of a major genetics company. Jefferson has taught Professional Responsibility more than fifty times and delivered more than 130 ethics presentations to major law firms, state bar continuing legal education programs, and law faculties across the United States and internationally. Before entering academia, Jefferson practiced law with the international law firms Mayer Brown and Hunton & Williams and served as an Assistant City Attorney for Charlottesville, Virginia. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School.

An award-winning scholar, she is the author of five books and more than 30 academic articles in leading journals such as Fordham Law Review, Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Illinois Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Washington & Lee Law Review, Washington Law Review, and Yale Law Journal Forum. Her book, Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court, has been called “an excellent contribution” by the Library Journal and praised in numerous reviews. Jefferson’s work is frequently cited in range of media including the Associated Press, Bloomberg Law, CNN, Houston Chronicle, New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Slate, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. She regularly appears on radio and television news shows, including MSNBC and National Public Radio.

Professor Jefferson often is called upon to consult and testify as an expert on lawyer and judicial ethics matters, including appearances before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary and the Supreme Court of Texas. She serves as a subject matter expert for the National Conference of Bar Examiners on the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam, and is a member of the West Academic Law School Advisory Board.

In 2015, Professor Jefferson was a scholar-in-residence at Stanford Law School's Center on the Legal Profession and a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation. In 2019, she held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Australia, where she conducted research for her forthcoming book, Law Democratized: A Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis.

Professor Jefferson has been selected for a range of leadership roles. She currently sits on the board of directors for the International Association of Legal Ethics. She was elected to the American Law Institute in 2017, and was named a fellow of the American Bar Foundation in 2016. She is a past-chair for the Association of American Law Schools Section on Professional Responsibility. She was appointed as a reporter for the American Bar Association Presidential Commission on the Future of Legal Services from 2014-16. She served as a delegate to the World Economic Form Global Agenda Councils on Justice (2014-16) and Rule of Law (2013-14).

Prior to joining the University of Houston faculty in 2016, Jefferson held the Foster Swift Professorship of Legal Ethics and was co-director of the Frank J. Kelley Institute of Ethics and the Legal Profession at Michigan State University College of Law, where she taught for a decade. During her time at Michigan State, she co-founded and secured substantial funding for the law school's inaugural program on technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation in legal services, recently recognized as a top program in the nation. She currently serves on the Michigan State University Board of Trustees, appointed in 2019.

Before her academic career, Professor Jefferson practiced law at Mayer Brown in Chicago and Hunton & Williams in Richmond, where she specialized in commercial litigation, telecommunications, and labor/employment law. She also worked as an Assistant City Attorney for Charlottesville, Virginia. She earned her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

Sub-specialities:

Judicial Appointments and Elections
Legal Ethics
Judicial Ethics
United States Supreme Court Appointments
Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Legal Services
Lawyer Malpractice and Fiduciary Duties