Categories
. Legal ethics

Bad judgment leads to bad judgment.

A Tennessee disciplinary matter has made some national news this past week, so what I am writing about might be something you’ve heard about already. It involves a Tennessee lawyer who has been given a 4-year suspension from practice, with one-year of active suspension for providing advice over Facebook to a woman about how she […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Three short burst updates

In case you haven’t yet “checked out” for the week to have what I hope is a makeshift, stay-at-home Thanksgiving banquet to kick-off your holiday weekend, here are four very short but, mostly timely, updates on topics of prior posts. First, the Tennessee Supreme Court has put the TBA advertising rule revisions proposal out for […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

The era of permanent disbarment in TN has begun.

What now seems like an eternity ago, because it was written in the before-times, I wrote about Tennessee’s change to its disciplinary procedural rules resulting in implementation of permanent disbarment. I questioned exactly why the change was needed and what it would mean given that it was being paired with changes to extend the maximum […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Abuse of “Iowa nice” leads to rare Dubuque rebuke.

Readers of this space know that a large part of my practice involves representing lawyers in disciplinary proceedings. Disciplinary proceedings are difficult for all that are involved, but rarely can anyone involved question that they don’t know the stakes. They are what they are and they have their own rules and procedures. Today’s post involves […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

A tale of two signature issues.

There are certain things that ought to be ingrained in lawyers that they know they cannot do. Maybe we could reach agreement on all of what should be on that list of things, but that task is far too ambitious for any Friday, much less this Friday. I would hope we could agree that an […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

PDA: If you’re going to get disbarred in TN, get it done before July 1, 2020.

Because if you can get it finalized by June 30, then you might still have the chance to be reinstated starting July 1, 2025. In this instance, PDA is short for “public disservice announcement,” not “public display of affection.” You might remember back last year I wrote about a proposed revision to the rules of […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Two updates: Ruff[alo]ed feathers in Georgia & Piercing personal jurisdiction in California

Apologies for the drought in content over the last little bit as I’ve been traveling my state for my Ethics Roadshow doing a three-hour presentation in four cities about what I think the future looks like for those who will still be practicing in 2025. For today, two updates of note that involve important, ongoing […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

What happens when it Gaetz worse?

So, I’m doing everything I can to only write about this stuff occasionally, but the latest stunt in connection with the ongoing investigations into the current administration requires at least some discussion – not just because of the brazen hypocrisy (after all the ethics rules do not prohibit lawyers from being hypocrites) but because the […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

A companion piece.

As I inch ever closer to my 400th blogpost here, today’s offering is something of a companion piece to a post I wrote almost exactly 13 months ago that demonstrates what should be an obvious point, what is a very important point in the world of disciplinary defense but much less obvious, and at least […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

But why though?

This past week the Tennessee Supreme Court proposed revisions to the rules of disciplinary enforcement that would transform disbarment into an irrevocable form of discipline in Tennessee and that would extend the potential length of a suspension from 5 years maximum to 10 years maximum. Which leads me to the highly-technical title of this post: […]