During my 2013 Ethics Roadshow, I had a rare opportunity to highlight three instances of former government prosecutors receiving public discipline over past misconduct. Such events are so rare that for three high-profile ones to happen in the same year seemed quite remarkable. One of those three involved a Texas prosecutor who was disbarred for […]
Author: Brian Faughnan
This month the New York City Bar Association has issued an interesting formal ethics opinion on what is, in some respects, a surprisingly little discussed ethical situation: What it can mean for a lawyer’s ethical obligations to simply be serving in a matter as “local counsel.” When I first saw some of the media coverage […]
One interesting difference among jurisdictions in the U.S. as to the regulation of lawyers involves whether a particular state has an unified bar association structure or not. A state like North Carolina operates under such a structure. Every lawyer that obtains a license to practice in North Carolina is a member of the state bar […]
This week a former in-house counsel whose travails were discussed at last years Ethics Roadshow finds himself back in the news this week as he is testifying at his boss’s trial. At the Roadshow we discussed that the former GC for PetroTiger Ltd. had been disbarred in late November of last year as a result […]
During my teleseminar presentation for the Clear Law Institute, I talked at some length about a situation dating back to January 2014 when a Chicago lawyer ended up agreeing to discipline over how she responded to a former client’s negative review of her on the Avvo service. You can read a bit about that story here, but […]
Another post keeping up with the ongoing effort in the State of Washington to try to close the access-to-justice gap through an outside-the-mainstream effort of authorizing certain types of legal services to be provided to the public by those not licensed to practice law. I’ve previously written about this here and here. Now the news, reported first […]
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Disputes with clients …
I find it interesting that very few of my posts over the last few months have involved situations where lawyers acted poorly in connection with disputes with their clients. In fact, it appears that really only one has involved such a situation, this one. I don’t quite know what to make of that fact given […]
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When is a phone not a phone?
In a world where people use their smart phones for seemingly everything, including actually talking to other people on the phone from time-to-time, an interesting ethics issue has been percolating in the world of attorney advertising. Namely, for purposes of the ethics rules that exist to restrict how lawyers can go out about actively soliciting […]
Tomorrow I will be one of two speakers for a three-hour CLE in Clarksville, Tennessee sponsored by the Montgomery County Bar Association. I’ll be talking about the variety of ethical issues surrounding audit response letters. Although providing them is certainly contemplated and permitted under RPC 2.3, there are other ethical issues, such as conflicts and […]
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Death and disbarment
Returning to the office from the holiday weekend, I noticed these two sad and weird stories of lawyers doing inexcusable things that seem to have common threads of death and disbarment running through them. Many years ago I wrote a humor column for young lawyers. and you can find some of those columns still floating […]