Lawyers and law firms have long struggled – at least during the length of my career – with whether they can, or should, include a provision in their contracts with clients that would require arbitration of some, or all, kinds of disputes. In situations where a local or state bar association offers a free, voluntary […]
Category: Legal ethics
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Bad judgment leads to bad judgment.
A Tennessee disciplinary matter has made some national news this past week, so what I am writing about might be something you’ve heard about already. It involves a Tennessee lawyer who has been given a 4-year suspension from practice, with one-year of active suspension for providing advice over Facebook to a woman about how she […]
Look at me with the super seasonally timely sports reference. Baseball. In January. I have written on quite a few occasions in the past about the perils for lawyers in responding to criticism posted about them online. Well, the ABA has issued its latest ethics opinion to address the same topic. Behold ABA Formal Ethics […]
Welcome to 2021 or, as some astute observers are calling it, 2020 goes to extra time. In an effort to feel a marginal amount of normality, I wanted to weave together two topics that might ostensibly be treated only as updates relevant to Tennessee lawyers but that actually involve developments of as much, if not […]
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Terror in Tennessee.
So somehow, given the time of year and the absolute flood of horrific news we all get exposed to on a daily basis, you might not have heard the news that a suicide bomber detonated a large bomb in the middle of downtown Nashville, Tennessee on Christmas morning. The bomb detonated from the inside of […]
Let’s talk about something coming out of D.C. but entirely unrelated to politics for a change. If you know, you know. And, if you know, then based on the post title you’ve guessed we are going to talk about the D.C. Bar Rules of Professional Conduct Review Committee’s draft Report on proposing changes to the […]
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An open letter to State Bar of Texas
Dear Sir or Ma’am: It’s been a tough year, but I hope this email finds you staying safe. I’m writing to urge you to give some real thought to whether your rule on the ability to impose an “interim” suspension on a Texas lawyer goes as far as it needs to in order to be […]
This is not really a “new content” post. With luck, I will have one of those later this week. This, however, is a follow up about something from last month. It is the best sort of follow up because it is prompted by the process of sifting back through the past year to prepare for […]
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Three short burst updates
In case you haven’t yet “checked out” for the week to have what I hope is a makeshift, stay-at-home Thanksgiving banquet to kick-off your holiday weekend, here are four very short but, mostly timely, updates on topics of prior posts. First, the Tennessee Supreme Court has put the TBA advertising rule revisions proposal out for […]
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Just the normal scrutiny.
I need something fun in my life at the moment to help deal with some of the insanity that is all around us all. So, let’s tell something of a non-linear story about how haphazardly the disciplinary rules can be enforced as against lawyers. (Okay, so maybe you and I see “fun” differently.) Typically, many […]