Jan L. Jacobowitz, JD
Founder & Owner
Legal Ethics Advisor
Jan L. Jacobowitz is a legal ethics, social media, and technology expert who is the founder and owner of Legal Ethics Advisor. 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 provides legal ethics consulting, opinion letters, and CLE training to law firms and legal organizations. She also serves as a legal ethics expert in litigation matters. Recently, she has been involved in matters involving issues such as attorney fees, conflicts of interest, the unauthorized practice of law, advertising, and the multi-jurisdictional practice of law.
She 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 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. She also co-developed the course 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.
Jan has presented at hundreds of Ethics CLE Seminars and has been a featured speaker on topics such as Social Media and Advertising, Technology, Lawyer's First Amendment Rights, Cultural Competence, Cybersecurity, Mindful Ethics, Litigation Funding, eDiscovery, Attorney Fees, Cannabis, and Artificial Intelligence. 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 a certified civil court mediator and an active member of the California Bar, the D.C. Bar and the Florida Bar.