As the title indicates, Tennessee – like almost all states under a Republican stranglehold – is currently experiencing a wave of legislative efforts to roll back progress on civil rights while also trying to make it difficult to vote them out of office by … making it more difficult for minorities to vote and have […]
Author: Brian Faughnan
Some different COVID news.
It is safe to say, at this point, that most of the United States, and particularly southern states such as mine, are treating the pandemic as being over. Whether it actually is or is not remains to be seen. If it is over, its lasting effects will certainly live on. This post isn’t exactly about […]
Confidentiality and credit cards
I have written here in the past about a number of ways that a lawyer’s obligation of confidentiality imposes limits on their ability to do certain things that others can do and even as to subject matter where it seems highly unfair. Most frequently, this issue arises when talking with lawyers about what they can […]
There has been A LOT of stuff going on this week in the world of legal ethics. I will refrain from dedicating an entire post to try to tie this plea I made in a post back in December 2020 to these two developments, here and here. Instead, I want to talk a little bit […]
An award-winning post.
The punny title will be just about the only non-serious aspect of today’s post. The ABA Center for Professional Responsibility announced the winner of the 2022 Michael Franck Professional Responsibility Award was announced by the ABA. This year’s honoree is Lucian Pera of Memphis. Odds are, if you are someone who reads this blog, you […]
This is a question I’ve asked in the past. It is not instinctively an easy question to wrestle with. It can easily boil over into various slippery-slope arguments and accusations regarding risk of inviting concepts of the “thought police” and the like. But another news item invites the question back into the arena for further discussion. This ABA […]
Roses are red. Violets are blue. California has a new ethics opinion about what to do when your client no longer remembers you. I’m no Langston Hughes or Emily Dickinson. I’m not even at the level of say … Spike Milligan. And since it isn’t dated from what I can tell, I cannot be certain […]
“It’s Groundhog Day… again.”
This past week included one of our nation’s most heralded fake holidays. Groundhog’s Day. Silly occasion, but still a really good movie, of course. But, playing off of the theme of repeating events and disappointing outcomes, we return to the oft-discussed topic of lawyers trying to respond to online criticism. We’ve covered in the past […]
Just another follow-up Friday.
Yes, if you are about the same age as me, you can sing that title to The Bangles tune of “Just another Manic Monday …” So, this is a weirder follow up post as it follows up on something I posted in October 2021 but involves substantive content that came into existence in July 2021 […]
“In representing a client …”
I’ve written in this space in the past before about how there are many ethics rules that limit their application to lawyers such that they do not kick in unless a lawyer is representing a client. Perhaps, most prominently, this point has been dwelt upon when talking about the efforts to convince jurisdictions to enact […]