Practicing Across State Lines: Remote Work, Firm Footprints, and Avoiding Unauthorized Practice

Amy E. Richardson, Shareholder | Maynard Nexsen PC

Amy E. Richardson is a Shareholder in Maynard Nexsen PC’s Litigation and Government Investigations & White-Collar Defense practice groups, practicing from the firm’s Raleigh, North Carolina and Washington, D.C. offices. Her work centers on legal ethics and professional responsibility, white-collar defense, and complex commercial litigation. She counsels and represents lawyers and law firms in disciplinary investigations, prosecutions, malpractice matters, and high-stakes arbitration, and guides legal-industry clients through shareholder admissions and departures and law firm dissolutions.

• Education & Credentials

Ms. Richardson earned her J.D., cum laude, from the Duke University School of Law in 2002, and her B.A. in Communications, summa cum laude, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1998. She is admitted to the state bars of the District of Columbia and North Carolina and served as a law clerk to the Hon. N. Carlton Tilley of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.

• Recognition & Leadership

Ms. Richardson holds a Band 1 ranking from Chambers USA for North Carolina Litigation, White Collar and Government Investigations. She has been recognized by Business North Carolina’s Legal Elite, Best Lawyers in North Carolina, and North Carolina Super Lawyers, including its Top 100: 2025 North Carolina Super Lawyers and Top 50: Women North Carolina Super Lawyers lists, and was previously named a Rising Star from 2015 to 2017. In 2023 she was named to North Carolina Lawyers Weekly’s Power List for Business Defense, and in 2025 she joined Law360’s Editorial Advisory Board on Legal Ethics.

• Professional Involvement

Beyond her practice, Ms. Richardson serves as an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and a Senior Lecturing Fellow at the Duke University School of Law, teaching legal ethics and professional responsibility. She co-leads the North Carolina Chapter of the Women’s White Collar Defense Association, chairs the Professional Responsibility Committee of the ABA Business Law Section, and is a member of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers (APRL) and the Federation of Defense & Corporate Counsel (FDCC). Her bar service includes a trusteeship on the North Carolina Bar Client Security Fund Board (2019–2025), the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Affairs Committee on Admissions and Practice (2019–2025), the North Carolina State Bar Ethics Committee (2018–2021), and North Carolina Bar Association leadership as Litigation Council Vice Chair (2019–2020) and Chair (2020–2021) and as a Professionalism Committee Vice Chair (2019–2020) and member (2019–present).

• Experience

Ms. Richardson has presented matters before multiple state bars, federal courts, the USPTO Office of Enrollment and Discipline (OED), and the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), and has served as an expert witness offering opinions on legal ethics issues. She handles complex civil cases in federal court,  state court, and arbitration proceedings throughout the United States, with matters spanning class actions, multidistrict litigation defense, and frequent trial work, along with communications-technology industry disputes involving the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), intercarrier compensation, and access fees. She has successfully represented companies before federal and state regulatory agencies, the Department of Justice, and Offices of Inspector General, helping clients identify and comply with federal regulatory requirements and preparing them for grand jury appearances and trial. Two of her matters have been the subject of documentaries featured on Netflix and Peacock.

SESSION 1 – Practicing Across State Lines: Remote Work, Firm Footprints, and Avoiding Unauthorized Practice | 1:00pm – 2:00pm

Remote and hybrid practice are now permanent, and firms increasingly expect attorneys to handle matters tied to states where they are not admitted. Rule 5.5 was never built for this reality and remains a patchwork of inconsistent, state-specific requirements that leaves multistate firms and lawyers exposed. This program maps where the unauthorized-practice lines fall when work crosses jurisdictions. It addresses whether an attorney’s physical location alone creates risk, how matters governed by another state’s law change the analysis, and when a firm’s website disclosures, virtual offices, and client communications inadvertently signal practice where no one is admitted. It also addresses the supervisory responsibility questions that remote, multistate staffing raises under Rules 5.1 and 5.3. Attendees will leave with practical structures, including intake screening, local-counsel and pro hac vice protocols, disclosure language, and internal policies, designed to hold up if a multijurisdictional practice is ever questioned.

BREAK | 2:00pm – 2:10pm 

SESSION 2 – The Race to Rewrite Rule 5.5: Reform Proposals, State Experiments, and What Comes Next for Multistate Practice | 2:10pm – 3:10pm 

This session addresses how fast those lines are moving—and why the Rule 5.5 most lawyers trained under may not survive the decade. The consequences of getting multijurisdictional practice wrong remain serious, spanning discipline in every jurisdiction where a lawyer offers services under Rule 8.5, fee forfeiture, and potential criminal exposure, and that risk is precisely what is fueling a national reform movement. This session traces that movement from ABA Formal Opinion 495 on remote work through the growing roster of states that have amended their rules to expressly permit out-of-state lawyers to practice remotely from within their borders, to the proposals now on the table to replace Model Rule 5.5 altogether: APRL’s proposed rewrite permitting practice across jurisdictions with client disclosure and competence as the touchstones, and the ABA’s pending Issues Paper weighing competing disclosurebased models. It also situates Rule 5.5 reform within the broader re-regulation of legal services, regulatory sandboxes, alternative business structures, and new practitioner categories—that is reshaping who may deliver legal services and where. Attendees will leave understanding which reforms are likely to reach their states first, how the disclosure-based models would change day-to-day multistate practice, and what firms should build now so their structures work under both the current patchwork and the rules that replace it.