Suzanne Burke Spencer

Suzanne Burke Spencer is a managing shareholder at Sall Spencer Callas & Krueger. She said she was drawn to professional responsibility in law school and her first legal internship was for a legal ethics professor.

As a junior associate, Burke Spencer assisted one of the senior partners with drafting a chapter on business litigation ethics for a West publication. While she had an intellectual interest in legal ethics from early on, she hadn’t really considered practicing in the area of professional responsibility until she relocated from the East Coast to California in 1996 or so and went to work for Rob Sall, the founding partner of her firm.

“What I loved the most about the practice area was that underlying the meaty professional responsibility issues, there is great variety,” Burke Spencer said. “The nature of the case underlying the legal malpractice action can be anything from patent prosecution to dog breeding rights.”

In the early 2000s, she left the firm for a number of years and her practice area shifted to more business and real estate litigation, but she returned to the firm almost fifteen years ago. In all, her practice has concentrated on legal malpractice, fee disputes and professional responsibility for more than twenty years.

For confidentiality reasons, Burke Spencer cannot discuss cases. However, she spoke about trends in the field that need to be addressed, including generative AI.

“I don’t think it will be long before the use of generative AI in the practice of law will become the standard of care, raising competency issues for those who do not make use of it,” she explained. “Lawyers may also face claims that they’ve charged unconscionable fees if they bill a client hundreds of hours for a task that would have taken a fraction of the time with the assistance of generative AI. Lawyers will still be required to exercise independent professional judgment and actually analyze and apply legal principles to whatever situations their clients face, but generative AI products designed for use in the legal field are likely to be of great assistance to lawyers in doing so and lawyers who fail to recognize that may end up running afoul or their professional obligations to their clients.”