Florida is a hopeless place.

No, I’m not going to have to get into talking about that it has a joke of a governor and has been actively trying to not make decisions in the best interest of public health during a crisis.

I’m just going to focus on two developments in the legal ethics space that have occurred in the last 24-48 hours.

First, in something that will be given short shrift because of the second development, the Florida Bar has advanced a proposal to revise its rules to establish that disciplinary complaints filed by judges against lawyers should be entitled to greater weight than other complaints. I have defended many lawyers in disciplinary proceedings. I have defended lawyers when complaints were filed against them by judges. The fact that a judge has filed a complaint against a lawyer does not inherently mean that the complaint should be entitled to more weight nor that it should be harder to convince disciplinary counsel to drop the complaint. This kind of proposal is problematic on at least two levels – One is that it becomes ripe for abuse by judges. But the other is that it inherently indicates an existing flawed process must exist already. Either you have a mechanism for enforcing discipline that can appropriately investigate and evaluate a complaint to determine if it should be pursued or you don’t. If you tell the public that complaints from certain categories of people need to get special treatment, then you don’t.

Second, you might recall many years ago I wrote a series of posts about the TIKD app down in Florida and its fight with regulatory authorities. What you might find crazy is that up until today the Florida Supreme Court had not gotten around to ruling on the question of whether TIKD was engaged in UPL. Well, the Florida Supreme Court ruled today and what you might find even crazier is that they concluded that the TIKD app was UPL and entered an order permanently enjoining it from operation. The Florida Supreme Court did this even though that the referee that initially heard the matter granted summary judgment in favor of TIKD. Madness.

Three justices attempted to stave off this madness in their well-done dissent. That part of the opinion starts at p. 21 of the link above.

If you don’t have the time to read that part, the following two snippets would tell you what you need to know:

TIKD formulated no legal strategy. It gathered no evidence. It filed no court papers. It made no court appearances, no arguments to a judge or jury. Other than in explaining its offerings on its website, it answered no questions. It did not, because it could not, promise its customers that their communications would be privileged. In short, if you had hired TIKD to solve your legal problem and received only what the company offered—without the
services of the member of The Florida Bar it helped you find—you probably would have wanted your money back.

That is because TIKD offered not legal services, but a business proposition: hire a lawyer we introduce, at a fee we set, and you will not bear the risk that the lawyer’s services, or indeed your ticket, will cost you more than our fee. Offering that bargain does not constitute the practice of law, and thus cannot have constituted the unauthorized practice of law. Because today’s decision reaches well beyond our constitutional mandate to “regulate the admission of persons to the practice of law and the discipline of persons admitted[,]” art. V, § 15, Fla. Const., and into the business arrangements of people trying to solve their legal problems, I respectfully dissent.

If you ever wanted to think about just how difficult the task of regulating the practice of law will be and how entrenched some mindsets are within the bar and the judiciary, today is the kind of day to mull it over.