Three short burst updates

In case you haven’t yet “checked out” for the week to have what I hope is a makeshift, stay-at-home Thanksgiving banquet to kick-off your holiday weekend, here are four very short but, mostly timely, updates on topics of prior posts.

First, the Tennessee Supreme Court has put the TBA advertising rule revisions proposal out for public comment. You can access the order here. The deadline for public comments is March 12, 2021, so you can anticipate that if these revisions are adopted, they likely will not be going into effect prior to May or, more likely, June 2021 at the earliest.

Second, despite the fact that most if not all of the “battleground” states have certified their results, the outgoing, impeached, one-term President’s lawyers do not seem to be relenting on their insistence on court filings and out-of-court false statements. The ongoing behavior has spurred quite a few prominent voices in legal ethics to speak out on the issues, but that there appear to be clear violations and also the reasons that there will quite likely never be any discipline imposed. You can read a couple of different articles surveying the landscape here, and here. Also, as a slightly more direct follow up to my post from late last week, you can read this article from Reuters that includes some interactions with yours truly.

Third, and technically not what would typically qualify as an “update,” nor possibly even a “short burst,” lawyers continue to have difficulty navigating protecting client confidences when seeking to withdraw from representations. I haven’t written about any instances of lawyers getting disciplined for such missteps in a long time, but there now is an extremely recent example of a lawyer being publicly censured for exactly that, and it arises from my home state. You can read the press release about the public censure here.

The press release, unsurprisingly, does not contain much in the way of details beyond indicating that the problematic conduct was “negligently disclosing confidential client information in an affidavit filed with [a] Motion to Withdraw from representation.” In fact, it would be horrible if too many details were included in such a press release when the underlying problem was the lawyer disclosing too much information in connection with seeking withdrawal.

What is a little surprising is that this discipline came about only have a full trial before a hearing panel. If you’d really like to know more of the full story, you can read the Hearing Panel judgment after the trial at the link below. (Bad link replaced with PDF download.)

For those readers who may be thinking to themselves, sure but I would never make that kind of error, the lawyer in question has been licensed in Tennessee for nearly 50 years. So maybe you shouldn’t be so confident?

But, for the benefit of those same readers, the lawyer in question also made clear in his efforts to defend himself in the proceedings (a fact that likely explains the need for the trial) that he did not comprehend (even after 50 years of practice) that the ethics rules impose an obligation of confidentiality that is much broader than the attorney-client privilege.

So, maybe you can be confident?