Categories
Legal ethics

DoNotP(L)ay

Or maybe we should title this post “Do Not Accept Payment” instead. So, a long time ago I wrote about some of the very good work that was being done by the folks associated with the “chat bot” app DoNotPay. If you do not remember any of that, you can refresh through this link. The […]

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. Legal ethics

Terror in Tennessee.

So somehow, given the time of year and the absolute flood of horrific news we all get exposed to on a daily basis, you might not have heard the news that a suicide bomber detonated a large bomb in the middle of downtown Nashville, Tennessee on Christmas morning. The bomb detonated from the inside of […]

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. Legal ethics

Protecting lawyers and law firms from themselves.

Let’s talk about something coming out of D.C. but entirely unrelated to politics for a change. If you know, you know. And, if you know, then based on the post title you’ve guessed we are going to talk about the D.C. Bar Rules of Professional Conduct Review Committee’s draft Report on proposing changes to the […]

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. Legal ethics

Conflicts in large law firms.

The title of this post is extremely boring. No getting around that fact. The topic though is not boring at all. Managing conflict issues in large law firms can be described in a number of different ways, but the adjective “boring” never fits the bill. The topic is front of mind for me this week […]

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. Legal ethics

The ABA comes through with another quality ethics opinion.

So, nearly everything is awful these days. Finding something interesting enough to avoid highlighting the awfulness around us is not altogether easy. This is pretty much too traumatic and damning to write about. Dwelling on this would just be petty at this point. Coming through as a light at the end of the tunnel today […]

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. Legal ethics

Truth is stranger than fiction.

This is not a post about politics in the United States, though the title of the post might make it seem like it could be. This is instead a post that has to be written because I saw a headline and thought, “well that has to be fodder for a post,” and then it turned […]

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. Legal ethics

Ethics opinion about a business conflict goes wrong.

It is very tempting to stay on the topic of bar examinations today, given recent absurdist developments. Arkansas has declared it simply has to have its in-person bar exam in July 2020 because things are likely to get worse as the year goes on. Oklahoma has attempted to reassure everyone about the safety of their […]

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. Legal ethics

Why can’t we (both) be friends (of the Court)?

So within the last few days the New York State Bar Association has issued an interesting new ethics opinion addressing a variation of an issue that is straightforward nearly everywhere. Lawyers tend to know that conflicts questions can often be complicated but that there is at least one that is pretty straightforward: different lawyers in […]

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. Legal ethics

Fine lines and not so fine lines

About six weeks ago, The Law For Lawyers Today published a good post about a problem for lawyers that sometimes lurks around efforts to make demands in order to settle legal disputes for clients — the risk of being accused of extortionate conduct. You can read that post here. That post was prompted by what […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

A teachable moment to make your eyes water.

When you spend a lot of time consulting with and advising lawyers, finding teachable moments from examples of things that happen in real life are extremely helpful. The world can be filled with teachable moments. On a non-ethics front, here is one: If you don’t pay attention to when a credit card has a new […]