Categories
. Legal ethics

Far too often anger begets violence both by, and against, lawyers.

I failed again as a blogger last week and do not have anything resembling a good excuse.  There is a lot going on in the world that is troubling and last week was simply a week where it felt like writing anything that was not about how our country has become okay with putting children […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

A short post-mortem for Tennessee’s proposed RPC 8.4(g)

With the flood of comments in opposition, and particularly the fact that the Attorney General of our state felt the need to file not just one but two comments in opposition, the unsuccessful end of the effort to convince the Tennessee Supreme Court to adopt a version of RPC 8.4(g) has felt inevitable for the […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Awesome post. Except for the part that isn’t.

There is an awful lot to like and agree with in this post from Dan Lear, one of the folks who have been the face of Avvo for quite some time.  But there is a piece of it that is just simply wrong, and while it would be hyperbole to say it is dangerously wrong, it […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

The intersection of the First Amendment and the Ethics Rules

So, I don’t know if any of you have ever played HQ Trivia.  In any session, they have between 500,000 and almost 2 million players, so statistically speaking, I guess there is a chance you have.  While it has nothing to do with legal ethics, in order to understand the context of what follows, let […]

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. Legal ethics

My 300th Post. The shady “Stormy” story gets shadier.

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 […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Idaho why I insist on punny titles.

So, those familiar with this space may remember I have written a bit from time-to-time about Tennessee’s proposed rule revision to adopt a modified version of ABA Model Rule 8.4(g).  The future of the proposal is still up in the air and the public comment period continues to run until March 21, 2018.  If you […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

I Dowd that very much.

Last week was a pretty eventful week in the area where politics and the law overlaps, and an initially bizarre turn of events that was made more bizarre by subsequent claims injected some questions of legal ethics into events on the national stage again. What I’m talking about is all stuff you’ve likely already read […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Three-For-Tuesday.

Any old radio station in your town (most probably one playing “Classic Rock”) can provide you with a Two-For-Tuesday, but where else will you find a Three-For approach to this otherwise underrated day of the week? First, I recently let you know that Tennessee was in play with a proposed version of RPC 8.4(g) to […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

RPC 8.4(g) – Tennessee is in play

I’m pleased to report that, yesterday, a joint petition was filed by the Tennessee Bar Association and the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility asking the Tennessee Supreme Court to adopt an RPC 8.4(g) patterned after the ABA Model Rule. As I’ve written here in the past, I’ve long been hopeful (not necessarily optimistic but certainly […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

A rare example of the perfect application of RPC 8.4(c)

I’ve written in the past about issues associated with RPC 8.4(c) and how its potential application to any act of dishonesty on the part of a lawyer — no matter how trivial or unrelated to the practice of law it might be — makes it a problematic ethics rule.  A disciplinary proceeding presently being pursued […]