Recently I wrote a bit about the latest Formal Ethics Opinion adopted in Tennessee including a bit of additional content focused on the enactment of this opinion as the maiden voyage of the new process involving the seeking of public comment on the FEO in draft form. If you missed those, you might want to […]
You take them both and there you have … the news about Tenn. Formal Ethics Opinion 2019-F-167 (draft). First, the good. I cannot give sincere and strong enough kudos to the Tennessee BPR for implementing a new policy to release draft Formal Ethics Opinions to the public for comment before deciding to actually adopt and […]
I’m interested in writing today about two recent ethics opinions that manage to go together quite nicely. Utah Ethics Adv. Op. 18-04 and Texas Professional Ethics Committee Op. 679. Both involve RPC 1.8 (or at least both should). And, not only does neither opinion do a very good job with the subject matter it tackles […]
So, I’ve made something of a habit of writing about ethics opinions. Bad ones and good ones. Mostly bad ones though. As the trite – almost hackish – title of this post telegraphs, today I want to compare and contrast two recently released ethics opinions that manage to demonstrate the good that can come from […]
Were you looking for something that is very well-written but entirely unhelpful to your needs as a lawyer? Well, you’ve come to the right place today. Wait, I now see how that paragraph could be misconstrued in an entirely unflattering way and as an inadvertent passing of judgment on this whole blog. Obviously, I didn’t […]
If you had told me back in March 2015 when I started this blog that my 300th blogpost would struggle with trying to decide which angle of a statement to The New York Times made by a personal attorney for the 45th President of the United States about paying $130,000 to a porn star to apparently buy […]
I’m writing from Boise where tomorrow I’m delighted to have the chance to speak on legal ethics for the Idaho Prosecuting Attorneys Association. (I’m also delighted that the weather is unseasonably warm at the moment.) Last year I had the chance to do a similar presentation for the Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference. Prosecuting attorneys […]
Answering the question that was undoubtedly on the minds of every lawyer practicing in that state, the Lawyer’s Advisory Committee of the Nebraska Supreme Court issued Ethics Advisory Opinion for Lawyers No. 17-03 making clear that, yes, lawyers can accept payment from clients in the form of Bitcoin or other similar digital currencies. I don’t […]
It is almost three months old now, but I wanted to right a word or two about a really well-constructed ethics opinion issued in Colorado, not just because it is an opinion that deserves to be read, but also because it raises a not-quite-academic question about the phenomenon of captive law firms. The opinion put […]
Lawyers who frequently represent other lawyers in disciplinary proceedings are well aware that the ethics rules in their state offer up an inherent 2-for-1 construction for bar prosecutors because states with versions of RPC 8.4(a) patterned on the Model Rules establish that a lawyer also violates RPC 8.4(a) by violating any other ethics rule. That […]