SEVERSON: The American Bar Association offers video seminars of actors portraying attorneys dealing with ethical situations, but the public gets its impressions about lawyering from prime-time TV.

Footage from ABC program THE PRACTICE: He's going to kill again. That's not something to mention in your closing. Not even something we should think about.

SEVERSON: TV may do a good job dramatizing ethical dilemmas but usually doesn't explain that the lawyers are simply obeying the rules. For instance, the confidentiality rule prohibits defense attorneys from revealing facts about a past crime. And the rule in most states makes it very difficult for an attorney to disclose confidential information except in the most extreme cases, such as when criminal violence is imminent.

DEAN GILLERS: What the rule really addresses and only addresses is the client who walks into a lawyer's office carrying a gun and says, "I'm fed up with that S.O.B., I'm going to go and kill him," and storms out of the lawyer's office.

SEVERSON: No wonder, according to a recent Gallup poll, the public rates lawyers high, among the top professions, for prestige, but nearer the bottom for honesty and ethics.

DEAN GILLERS: People might love to hate lawyers, but when it comes to their own particular problem, they want their lawyer to be a junkyard dog, to be a real S.O.B. and to get for them every cent the lawyer can, whether or not it's fair and just.

SEVERSON: It's not only the public who view lawyers negatively. Lawyers themselves, particularly new ones, wrestle with the demands of their profession and their own sense of what's right.

PROFESSOR WILLIAM ELWARD (Loyola University Law School -- to students): Is there room for having a conscience in the practice of law? Do you think there's room for this?

SEVERSON: Professor William Elward teaches a Loyola law school class on evidence, with some ethical twists.

KIM (Student): It really bothers me that people think that if you're going to practice law you can't have ethics, and I have very strong ethics. And I could not work for a nursing home as an attorney, if I knew they were doing bad things.

PROFESSOR ELWARD: But ... you have a summer home, you got a Lexus, you have a husband, you have direct TV.

SEVERSON: The confidentiality rule comes into play for corporate behavior as well. Almost every company headquarters in every American city has at least one corporate attorney whose job is to keep the company within the law but cannot violate the confidentiality rule, even when the corporation is breaking the law.

DEAN GILLERS: Just think about that: a dangerous product can seriously injure thousands of people, can kill dozens or hundreds of people, but a lawyer today will not be allowed to reveal, in a great majority of states, the prospect of the injury.

SEVERSON: One of the more notable cases occurred here in Chicago when a corporate attorney blew the whistle on a potentially dangerous company product and was fired for it.

When Roger Balla, here with his attorney Alan Amos, heard that his employer, Gambro Incorporated, intended to sell substandard filters for kidney dialysis machines, he advised against it. And then Balla heard the company was going ahead with the sale anyway. Although Gambro never admitted guilt, according to the court opinion, the substandard dialyzers could be dangerous.

MR. ALAN AMOS: Again, this was from the opinion, "We will sell them to a unit that is not currently our customer, but who buys only on price."

SEVERSON (to Amos): So price would be the determining factor, the health of the patient would not be?

MR. AMOS: It seems that way, doesn't it.

SEVERSON: When Balla heard Gambro was proceeding with the sale he protested again and was fired, told it was an employee cutback.

The next day he reported [this to] the Food and Drug Administration, which immediately seized the filters and stopped the sale. He later sued Gambro, charging that he was fired for blowing the whistle.

But Roger Balla lost the case. The court ruled that he didn't deserve compensation for being fired, because he was simply doing his duty. Illinois is one of the few states that requires attorneys to report potentially life-threatening wrongdoings to the authorities.

DEAN GILLERS: It's a very sad case, and very bad law, and thankfully it's been rejected in a number of other American jurisdictions.

MR. AMOS: Why let the business prosper because it's doing something illegal? And yet the lawyer who goes out on the limb and risks his professional career in order to adhere to a legal ethic, and reports that, is given no benefit whatsoever, and the corporation is immune from any lawsuit. That to me is wrong.

SEVERSON: Every attorney we have spoken with concedes [that] the confidentiality is not perfect, but defends it as a fundamental reason the American justice system works.

As for Henry Drake, he's not so sure about legal ethics.

(to Drake): Do you hate William Campbell?

MR. DRAKE: No. No, I don't hate nobody.

SEVERSON: What about the lawyer? Mr. Beall?

MR. DRAKE: He was wrong. He was wrong. He was a wrong man.

SEVERSON: It will be of little comfort to Henry Drake that the American Bar Association is considering adding some exceptions to the confidentiality rule. But most observers don't expect any significant changes. For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I'm Lucky Severson near Colbert, Georgia.

BOB ABERNETHY: Most states have laws that are less restrictive than the ABA rule, when it comes to disclosing confidential information between attorney and client.