Categories
Legal ethics

Two brutal 2024 ethics opinions highlight the need for reform.

Over the last couple of years, as a result of my involvement with APRL, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a group of smart lawyers to seek to advance reform with respect to the status of Model Rule 5.5 and, more recently, am involved similarly in trying to start the process of reform for […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Can you name all the ABA Model Rules that can never be violated?

Instinctively, if you know your way around the attorney ethics rules, I don’t think the question posed by the title of this post is a particularly hard question. But two incidents I’ve experienced within the last few weeks have caused me to question how well understood it is among the legal community that there are […]

Categories
Legal ethics

The idea of an independent DOJ also died today.

It feels very “fiddling while Rome burns” to write about the legal ethics implications of today’s Supreme Court ruling that has the potential to have ended core concepts of our Constitutional Republic just 3 days before what would have been its 248th birthday, but legal ethics issues are things that I am more than qualified […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Generating more Generative AI content

It has somehow been a minute since I’ve written any updates on anything in the world of Generative AI issues. That hasn’t, of course, been because things haven’t been happening. They have. And even today I found myself as part of yet another panel presentation on the ethics issues surrounding the rise of the use […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Anti-discrimination v. anti-diversity

It has been a while since I have written anything here about ABA Model Rule 8.4(g) and efforts to adopt variations of it at the state level anywhere. Part of why that is the case is that there hasn’t (to the best of my knowledge) been many developments of note to write about. Part of […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Texas Op. 701 – half right is still wrong.

We aren’t doing “Bad Ethics Opinion or Worst Ethics Opinion” only because it is Texas so grading has to be on a curve. But we are still going to take a Texas opinion addressing whether a Texas attorney can offer a “subscription model” of legal services to task. Opinion No. 701 issued during May 2024 […]

Categories
Legal ethics

To “Non” or not to “Non”?

Is currently sort of a question it seems. It is not the world’s most pressing question, but it is a discussion topic in the world of the practice of law getting some extensive media scrutiny in legal publications. For example, here, here, and here. For those not fully enmeshed in the topic already, the issue […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Bad Ethics Opinion or the Worst Ethics Opinion? Massachusetts edition

Let’s play a blogpost game we haven’t played in a long time. (Yeah, I know, you’re saying to yourself … well that could be anything since you took all of March 2024 off buddy. A month or so seems long, but it’s actually been almost 7 years since I whipped out the “bad or worst” […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Beyond disbarred in Colorado

Stop me if I’ve said this before … but I’m a bad blogger. With that out of the way, here is something exceedingly rare and that caught my attention — a court ordering that a lawyer, who had already been disbarred, was now no longer entitled to even file things in court on a pro […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Another failed effort to pretend Rule 5.6(a) has no teeth.

It has been a minute since I’ve had a decent reason to write a post regarding efforts of law firms to try to come up with ways around the ethical restriction imposed by RPC 5.6(a) in jurisdictions that track the Model Rules. A recent Colorado case does the trick. (And, thankfully it does, because otherwise […]