On April 1, 2026, a press release issued about a Tennessee lawyer getting suspended for what primarily appears to be misconduct in connection with withdrawing from representation of a client of a type I’ve written about in the past.
The matter involved a lawyer in Washington County, Tennessee* who, in seeking to withdraw from the representation of a criminal defendant, “made derogatory and disparaging statements about his client, and revealed confidential information related to the representation of the client without the client’s consent.”
Spilling the details of the reasons for seeking withdrawal from a matter, and particularly a criminal case, can be an obvious RPC 1.6 problem for lawyers. As indicated, this is a topic I’ve written about a few times, including most recently last year. That topic has even been the subject of yet another ABA Ethics Opinion about what a lawyer can say when withdrawing.
This post is not about repeating those points. Instead, this involves trying to figure out what in the world is meant by this portion of the findings against that lawyer that apparently formed the basis for concluding he violated RPC 1.7 (and possibly the basis for the finding of a violation of 1.9)*:
Mr. Johnson represented a client in a criminal matter after representing the client in a separate criminal matter some years previously. The new representation was improperly conditioned upon the client making outstanding payments for the prior representation.
Now, one of two things is entirely possible. One, there might be some crazy provisions that the lawyer included that would justify the statement that requiring the former deadbeat client to be less deadbeat in order to represent them again “was improperly conditioned.” Two, it is quite possible since this matter involves a Conditional Guilty Plea that the lawyer being disciplined cared only about how long they were going to be suspended and did not push back against the findings as to specific rules being violated or specific conduct that was a violation.
But, barring one of those two things being true, putting out into the world as a general concept that a lawyer cannot say to someone who is a former client — “You still owe me money from our prior representation. I’m not willing to represent you in a new matter unless you take care of your past debt” — is a bad development.
Now, to try to be clear about what I am saying, I recognize that it is certainly academically possible to evaluate this situation and concluded that unless the lawyer requires the former client to pay in full prior to restarting the attorney-client relationship that there could be an RPC 1.7(a)(2) material limitation conflict created by the lawyer’s personal interest in being paid for past work, but . . . once again we scream into the void two sentences in Paragraph [15] of the Scope section of the rules: “The Rules of Professional Conduct are rules of reason. They should be interpreted with reference to the purposes of legal representation and of the law itself.”
Fundamentally, a situation in which the lawyer agrees to accept installment payments on past due amounts for a prior representation in order to take on a new representation for that client is not different than when a lawyer continues to represent a client who has fallen behind on payments in an existing matter. You can also academically argue that there is an RPC 1.7(a)(2) conflict there as well. You could, but you shouldn’t.
And, if the explanation for this is situation number 2 above, then I’d say the same thing. Specifically, if disciplinary counsel figured they could tack on a violation for this because the lawyer would agree to it as part of an overall deal. You could, but you shouldn’t.
*Fun note for those of you who barely ever think about Tennessee – Washington County is further away from Memphis than Dallas, Texas is.
*It’s possible that the violation of RPC 1.9 found is just about confidentiality and rests upon the idea that some of what was said in the motion to withdraw was information about a former client representation rather than representation about the current client representation.