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Judicial Ethics

A brief personal announcement

It’s a new month and, for me, a new professional era. I have been privileged to work over the last 23 years for three excellent law firms ranging in size from 50+ lawyers to more than 300 or so. From my early years with Armstrong Allen all the way through the last 8 years at […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Examples #2,145 and 2,146 of the scope of the problem.

Having just scratched long unscratched itches of topics over which dust has gathered last week, let’s resume talking about more recent topics. Specifically, a topic that is going to need to continue to be bellowed about until we can get it fixed: the flaws in RPC 5.5. Thankfully, we have two further recent situations — […]

Categories
Judicial Ethics

Blasts from the past.

First, just a heads up that there will be some design changes taking place here at Faughnan on Ethics around the beginning of October 2022 so keep an eye out for that. Second, I know I haven’t written about anything recently but today is a day to knock out bunch of updates on things that […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Louisiana remains a legal embarrassment.

There are a lot of dumpster fire situations going on these days that have direct or indirect relationships to legal ethics. Frankly, there are too many to make it easy to decide which ones to think it makes sense to spend time writing about here. There is the seemingly evergreen issue of Donald Trump continually […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Ohio offers advice for lawyers representing Matt Damon

And other crypto bros too, I guess. You may recall in the halcyon days before any of us ever spent any time thinking about pandemics and public health on a daily basis that I wrote about how Nebraska became the first U.S. jurisdiction to issue ethics guidance on whether lawyers could accept payment of fees […]

Categories
Judicial Ethics

Speaking of public censures …

Today we get the chance to write about something that truly is a rare event — the imposition of public discipline against a sitting federal judge. And it is a story that when you reach the end of it leaves you feeling like the punishment was not really harsh enough but also very aware of […]

Categories
Legal ethics

You get a censure, you get a censure, everybody gets a censure!?

This is a post that will largely only speak to other lawyers who handled the defense of disciplinary matters. It is also a post that admittedly will — based on limited available information both broadly and narrowly — lack appropriate insight at a granular level. What it is intended to do, however, is point out […]

Categories
Legal ethics

One good item and one bad item for your Friday

Some days the inspiration kicks in and other days it most certainly does not. If this were Instagram, I’d likely try to spout some sort of perspiration to inspiration platitude. But this isn’t, so I won’t. I will though write about two items that somehow caught my attention this week and even though I can’t […]

Categories
Legal ethics

A virtual example of better, but not good enough.

I know it really hasn’t been that long (a little over two months ago) since I wrote on here to trumpet the APRL proposal for a new ABA Model Rule 5.5. If you missed that, it would help a lot to go read that post first. Here’s a link. I’ll wait right here until you […]

Categories
Legal ethics

New case offers rare glimpse into the black box of the Board of Law Examiners.

I fairly regularly represent people in proceedings in front of the Board of Law Examiners, and as a result, I have a bit of a running list of “grievances” with aspects of how that body conducts itself. At times where I have matters pending before it, it becomes difficult to spend too much capital speaking […]