This summary is not the rule. The rule text controls.
If you're a lawyer working under someone else, like a senior partner or a supervisor, you still have to follow the rules of professional conduct yourself. You can't excuse bad behavior by saying "my boss told me to do it." Every lawyer is personally responsible for following ethics rules, no matter their position at a firm.
That said, there's some protection if you're a junior lawyer following instructions on a genuinely unclear ethics question. If your supervisor gives you a reasonable answer to a tricky or debatable question about what the rules require, and you follow that guidance, you won't be in trouble even if someone later disagrees with that call. This only applies when the issue is genuinely arguable, not when the answer is obvious and your supervisor is clearly telling you to do something wrong.
In short, you can't hide behind orders from above when the ethics violation is clear. But if your supervisor reasonably interprets a gray area in the rules, you're allowed to trust that judgment and act on it.
