It’s an old adage that bad facts make bad law. In the last few weeks, a good number of pieces were written focusing heightened attention on an issue that many lawyers were already stewing about . . . technological vulnerabilities arising from how lawyers and law firms use (and don’t use) technology. Most of these […]
Tag: Loss prevention
So, yesterday, I started writing about the potential ramifications for lawyers of the adoption by the Department of Labor of its final “persuader” rule which will become effective on April 25, 2016, but will only be applicable to agreements entered into on and after July 1, 2016. You can catch up on part 1 here. […]
The scope of confidentiality lawyers owe to their clients has long been a subject that I find fascinating. Over the last few years, I’ve mulled how its broad scope will continue to play out with current and future generations of both lawyers and clients who routinely, almost even instinctively, share seemingly every detail of their […]
Late in 2015, the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility issued Formal Ethics Opinion 2015-F-160 addressing issues regarding retention of client files. I wrote here about a significant problem with the part of the opinion that indicated that our RPC 1.15(b) required retention of all client files for a five-year period. The problem, to me, was […]
A few months ago, I wrote a post about a frustrating Tennessee Ethics Opinion that offered guidance on lawyers’ obligations when responding to a subpoena for client information by, in part, treating a subpoena as if it were a court order. Last week, the ABA issued Formal Opinion 473, Obligations Upon Receiving a Subpoena or Other Compulsory […]
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. – Ferris Bueller Back in December 2015, during my Ethics Roadshow I talked a little bit about one of the items that had been rolled out for public comment by the ABA Commission on the Future […]
Categories
Airing the profession’s dirty laundry
Ok, let’s talk about the 60 Minutes piece that aired this past Sunday. If you haven’t watched it, by all means you should — it is worth the 20-30 minutes of your time. You can watch it here. As always, I’ll wait until you get done and come back. Now, it seems beyond dispute that the […]
Much has been written over the last few years about the risks for lawyers of increasingly sophisticated financial scams targeting them. I’ve even written about the issue some in the past. Within the last 30 days or so, a “new” financial scam has gotten some publicity that should help real estate lawyers in particular to […]
Lawyers need to be able to trust some people to do their jobs. These people might be support staff, colleagues, or sometimes even opposing counsel. When it comes to trust accounting though, situation after situation demonstrates that no matter how much a lawyer trusts an employee with access to or some control over trust account […]
In a lot of jurisdictions, mine included, formal ethics opinions from the governing disciplinary body are issued, if not rarely, then on a “few and far between” kind of time frame. In North Carolina, on October 23, 2015, 3 were released in one day. Two of them provide overall good advice. One of those two […]