Categories
. Legal ethics

Florida again. Sigh.

It has only been a little over a month at this point since I wrote about how Florida was a hopeless place. Well, here we are again. The Florida Bar Board of Governors has unanimously rejected a few proposals aimed toward progress in the re-regulation of the practice of law in the last week or […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

It’s another fine day to abolish the bar exam.

Now is another of the various times of year throughout the nation when law school graduates finish waiting anxiously for bar results and find out whether they passed and get the opportunity to start digging their way out of the debt they amassed in law school or failed and, thus, have to wrestle with the […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

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 […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

ABA Formal Op. 499: A consumer review

So, are you a lawyer in the market for an ethics opinion that largely gets to the right answer but has to do so in such a convoluted fashion that it makes you question just how badly your profession has lost the plot on what we should be doing when it comes to regulation and […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Following up despite it not being Friday – Tennessee advertising changes

So, sort of as promised, or at least in substantial compliance with a prior promise, I wanted to elaborate a bit more on the news out of Tennessee that we have adopted revisions to our lawyer advertising rules and talk a bit about what is now a new, pending proposal put out directly by the […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

10 Things I Thought I Would Write About This July, But Didn’t.

So, anyone I might have hooked into caring about this site in May and June 2021 likely stopped checking for July content 1 or 2 weeks ago. Longer-term, repeatedly neglected, readers are likely still hanging in there (and forever earning my esteem). There have been a bunch of times that I thought I was going […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Honestly, transparency is all that we need.

This week I was fortunate enough to be included as part of a presentation on debating issues of regulatory reform in a Plenary at the ABA National Conference on Professional Responsibility I recorded my 3-minute presentation a couple of months ago and spent a lot of time looking forward to how it would be received. […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

What decade is it again?

So, the experience of the last year of pandemic life has messed with a lot of people’s ability to remember when certain things happened. For some people, remembering events of the last year are not the problem as much as remembering when certain things happened in the before times. For others, short term memory of […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

The thing about the re-regulation of the practice of law …

. . . is it really could go either way. It could make things better or it could make things worse. It truly depends on who ends up doing the re-regulation and what motivates them along the way. What is prompting the need to say this sentiment out loud today exactly? Well, cynical types might […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Three developments presented in decreasing order of importance.

Last week, the Utah Supreme Court officially approved the most “radical” change in any state’s ethics rules since DC adopted a limited approval for law firms to have partners who are not lawyers several decades ago. The Utah Supreme Court announced its adoption of a package of reforms aimed at improving the access to justice […]