Within the past year or two, Tennessee adopted a new rule provision to specifically require the Court to suspend lawyers who have been determined to be in default on their student loans. The Tennessee Bar Association opposed the adoption of this rule for as long as it could but, ultimately, the pressure created by the […]
Press releases on public discipline issued by the BPR can be something of an art form and sometimes, but not always, don’t tell the whole story. So setting aside any tea-leaf reading that might otherwise go into this one involving what sounds like a situation in which a lawyer was perhaps unknowingly used by clients […]
I was not born in the South but have lived here for the overwhelming majority of my life. I’ve never understood, however, the uniquely Southern interest in the history of the Civil War. And, I don’t mean just at the role-playing levels of Civil War re-enactment events but even at the more subtle levels at […]
Recently, I wrote a little about the problems that can be presented in re-negotiating the terms of a fee agreement with an existing client in light of the requirements of RPC 1.8(a) governing business transactions with clients. Yesterday’s big legal news in Tennessee involves something that could be flippantly described as an RPC 1.8(a) problem […]
For an ethics nerd who also gets to focus on something they enjoy thinking about as part of their practice, I find the proliferation of lawyer rating services to be fascinating, less for the actual availability of ratings, but more for the ancillary questions they lead people to ask. One that I’ve seen discussed recently […]
From time to time, I have been asked questions about whether lawyers needed to be doing anything (or even could do anything) to try to better guarantee protections of client communications and maintain privilege and confidentiality in the world after the news started to come out about just how broad the NSA’s surveillance operations appeared […]
When lawyers think about problematic business transactions with a client, they usually think about things like loans or, perhaps, situations in which a lawyer is joining a client as an investor in a business venture. The ethics rule regarding business transactions with clients, RPC 1.8(a), is broader in its coverage than just those situations and, […]
Earlier this week, I wrote about the scariness that can come with understanding another way that lawyers’ fates are tied together when they practice law in the same firm: one lawyer failing to disclose a known problem on a malpractice renewal application could lead to loss of coverage for all of the other lawyers in […]
The month of April 2015 brought a declaration from a legal consultant that he anticipates seeing a 10,000 lawyer law firm within five years. Trying to determine if there would ever be a law firm so big that from a conflicts perspective its operation was fundamentally unworkable might be an interesting intellectual exercise to undertake, but […]
A little while back, I posted about a Virginia lawyer who had been suspended after being drunk and disruptive while attending a CLE. At the time, I speculated about what the ethics infraction might have been – making a false statement in terms of filling out the paperwork on attendance. I was in the ballpark, […]