Most of the country has an explicit rule prohibiting lawyers from having sex with their clients. Until this week, New Jersey didn’t — one of only ten states without one on the books. That changed last week, as reported by the New Jersey Globe.
On July 24, 2026, the New Jersey Supreme Court adopted a new provision — paragraph (k) of its Rule of Professional Conduct 1.8 — that flatly prohibits attorneys from beginning a sexual relationship with a client. The new paragraph tracks the ABA’s Model Rule 1.8(j) almost word for word:
A lawyer shall not have sexual relations with a client unless a consensual relationship existed between them when the client-lawyer relationship commenced.
In other words, if you were already involved with someone before you became their lawyer, you’re in the clear. But you can’t cross that line after the representation begins.
Further, the rule doesn’t stop at individual clients. Lawyers representing corporations, government bodies, or nonprofits are barred from starting sexual relationships with the people in the organization’s “litigation control group” or the officials actually directing the legal matter. And the conflict follows the individual lawyer working the case, not the whole firm; colleagues uninvolved in the representation are not automatically swept in.
The Rule in Louisiana
We’ve written about this before, because Louisiana is still on the short list of states that have not adopted Model Rule 1.8(j). Until last week, New Jersey was one of only ten states without a specific rule of this kind on the books, according to the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Professional Responsibility Rules Committee, which recommended the change as part of its 2024–2026 report, and Louisiana is one of those ten.
In 2004, the Louisiana Supreme Court considered (and, on a 5-5 vote of the LSBA’s Ethics 2000 Committee, declined to adopt) the ABA’s Model Rule 1.8(j) bright-line ban. Louisiana still has no rule that says, in so many words, “a lawyer shall not have sexual relations with a client.” Instead, as our earlier post on In re Fuerst laid out, Louisiana polices the same conduct through the general “personal interest conflict” standard in Rule 1.7(a)(2). The Louisiana Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in that case held that a lawyer can’t have a sexual relationship with a present client, but left relationships with former and prospective clients open — because those don’t create the same conflict-of-interest problem under Rule 1.7’s case-by-case analysis.
New Jersey’s new rule, and the other states that have adopted some version of Model Rule 1.8(j), are narrower than Louisiana’s personal interest conflict reading.
New Jersey’s rule now clearly prohibits sexual relations begun after representation starts, and it comes with a bright-line safe harbor for pre-existing relationships. If conduct doesn’t fit that definition, the rule simply doesn’t reach it. Louisiana’s Rule 1.7(a)(2), by contrast, is a conflict-of-interest standard that asks whether a lawyer’s personal interest creates a significant risk of materially limiting the representation. That standard doesn’t stop at sexual relations but can, in theory, reach romantic entanglements short of a sexual relationship, financial or business ties with a client, family relationships, or any other personal interest that compromises independent judgment. This may be one area where Louisiana lawyers could benefit from the comfort of a safe-harbor defined in the Rule itself, rather than having to discern it from the caselaw.
