Counselors, psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals are expected to avoid discrimination against LGBTQ+ clients and patients. Over time, ethical standards, principles, techniques, and scholarship have aligned to help identify a comprehensive set of guidelines for providing LGBTQ+ affirmative counseling. This chapter provides an overview of LGBTQ+ affirmative counseling based on a critical synthesis of professional standards with current research that can guide students, new practitioners, and any professional seeking to enhance their abilities to work with LGBTQ+ clients. This includes defining key terms, a brief overview of important historical events, and the principles and techniques associated with LGBTQ+ affirmative counseling.

Developing and practicing ethics requires an active and mindful approach that continues from graduate school throughout our careers. Because life in the real world tends to be messy with gray areas, contradictions, surprises, and rough edges, we must stay alert, distrust quick answers, and keep questioning. Knowing the ethics codes, laws, and professional guidelines is important; however, it is not enough. It is important not to let ethics, laws, and standards replace critical thinking, professional judgment, and personal responsibility. Our ability to think creatively and respond ethically to even the most daunting challenges seem mirrored by our shared human abilities to rationalize even the most unethical approaches. This chapter discusses the importance of learning to recognize and avoid the classic ethical fallacies. Attention is paid to the importance of knowing our weaknesses, ethical blind spots, biases, and ways to address these fallibilities in our careers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of many digital technologies currently under development.1 In recent years, it is having increasing repercussions in the field of law. These repercussions go beyond the traditional effect of an economic and industrial evolution. Indeed, the epochal industrial transformations and paradigmatic shifts it generates in many sectors have, from a legal perspective, a structural impact on legal rules and on legal practice. Moreover, the speed of these transformations also impacts on the regulatory response that a legislator is able to provide. In point of fact, rather than running the risk of new legislation rapidly becoming obsolete, regulators around the world have preferred so far to take their time to observe the changes unfolding in current technologies, and to assess their impacts from the legal point of view, before proposing any specific courses of action. Although legal experts, contrary to ethicists, have traditionally shown little interest in AI, algorithms, machine learning and so forth, it is now virtually impossible for them to ignore the impact of AI on the law, and more specifically, the question of whether actual legal rules and regulations can cope with the changes taking place in the economy and in the society, on one hand, and whether the use of AI tools in legal practice is compatible with the founding principles of our legal orders, on the other hand. If new rules are needed, lawyers will have to define their content and how to make sure they are suitable for the long term, in a context of rapidly changing technologies.