Categories
Legal ethics

Hot Censure Summer in Tennessee

I’ve written once before about the dynamics for disciplinary defense lawyers in trying to work through precedent based on limited information when a variety of disparate conduct by lawyers all results in the same level of discipline. In that post, the variety of discipline was public censure. And you won’t be shocked to hear that […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Wach the Tell?

So, it is trite to say that every picture tells a story. But it is trite for a reason. Here is a simple photo of two pages of the billing entries of the Wachtell Lipton firm in their representation of Twitter against Elon Musk in the Delaware litigation to force him to honor his promise […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Supervisory and subordinate are not like doms and subs.

Now that I’ve gotten you hooked with the salacious title to the post, I’ll hit you with the boring content. Among all the discussion that has transpired over who folks are calling the ChatGPT lawyers, who I wrote a bit about earlier this month, there has not been any real focus on who was the […]

Categories
Legal ethics

It’s called “reciprocal” discipline but …

Sometimes, not always of course, but sometimes representing a client in a disciplinary matter can become much more complicated if they hold licenses in multiple states. The problems of potential reciprocal discipline being imposed in those other states can sometimes make it difficult for a lawyer to be willing to agree to even minor discipline […]

Categories
Legal ethics

What’s a public censure when you’re shameless?

So, I’ve been starting and stopping a post about the most recent ABA Formal Ethics Opinion to be released. Partly, because the opinion is a bit pedestrian generally involving weighing in on a situation that is largely always an “it depends” on factors that are hard to spell out in an ethics opinion and partly […]

Categories
Judicial Ethics Legal ethics

Secret recordings can be good. Electing judges kind of can’t.

So, the reasons secret recordings will always happen in “one-party” recording states is that they get to the truth. Lots of people do not like them though. And judges absolutely loathe the notion of being secretly recorded. They do not like them so much that sometimes no matter what the secret recording reveals they will […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Tennessee Topic Today

There is an old saying about how when your only tool is a hammer, then you treat everything as a nail. I’m not getting the vernacular 100% correct, but you get the gist. That is the introduction for this post today because, as a lawyer who makes a living representing other lawyers (and obviously needs […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Just a sh***y lawyer practicing past his “sell-by” date

We here at this blog try not to write about things just for clicks or that revolve around stuff that simply every regular lawyer would know not to do. But the world demands exceptions sometimes, so here I am today addressing a story that popped up right before Turkey Day and that might help suppress […]

Categories
Legal ethics

New York Disbarment Speedrun

Now to get the obvious first question out of the way: “speedrun” is a term that gamers use to refer to tackling a video game in a manner where the goal is to try to just complete the whole thing as quickly as possible rather than worrying about high scores. If you want to do […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Examples #2,145 and 2,146 of the scope of the problem.

Having just scratched long unscratched itches of topics over which dust has gathered last week, let’s resume talking about more recent topics. Specifically, a topic that is going to need to continue to be bellowed about until we can get it fixed: the flaws in RPC 5.5. Thankfully, we have two further recent situations — […]