Categories
. Legal ethics

Nebraska brings us … this.

It’s been something of a big month for Nebraska. First, thanks to its divided approach to providing electoral votes, it is contributing one of the electors totaling up to President-Elect Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes. Second, like everywhere else in the United States (my state is doing just as bad if not worse) unfortunately, it […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Increasing access to information about legal services – TN Edition

This will be a mostly short entry for this week because the most important item to put into your reading pile is what I’m writing about rather than the post itself. (Admittedly, I’m certain many of you are thinking … “well, that’s kind of always true Einstein.”) I have written over the years here about […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Conflicts in large law firms.

The title of this post is extremely boring. No getting around that fact. The topic though is not boring at all. Managing conflict issues in large law firms can be described in a number of different ways, but the adjective “boring” never fits the bill. The topic is front of mind for me this week […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Rotting from the top down.

Being a lawyer is hard. It is certainly not the hardest thing in the world to be, but it is hard. Lawyers have lots of obligations and lots of stress. Again, there are many who have things worse, of course. Among those “lots of obligations” are obligations to supervise those who work for them that […]

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. Legal ethics

The ABA comes through with another quality ethics opinion.

So, nearly everything is awful these days. Finding something interesting enough to avoid highlighting the awfulness around us is not altogether easy. This is pretty much too traumatic and damning to write about. Dwelling on this would just be petty at this point. Coming through as a light at the end of the tunnel today […]

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. Legal ethics

Truth is stranger than fiction.

This is not a post about politics in the United States, though the title of the post might make it seem like it could be. This is instead a post that has to be written because I saw a headline and thought, “well that has to be fodder for a post,” and then it turned […]

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. Legal ethics

The era of permanent disbarment in TN has begun.

What now seems like an eternity ago, because it was written in the before-times, I wrote about Tennessee’s change to its disciplinary procedural rules resulting in implementation of permanent disbarment. I questioned exactly why the change was needed and what it would mean given that it was being paired with changes to extend the maximum […]

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. Legal ethics

The thing about the re-regulation of the practice of law …

. . . is it really could go either way. It could make things better or it could make things worse. It truly depends on who ends up doing the re-regulation and what motivates them along the way. What is prompting the need to say this sentiment out loud today exactly? Well, cynical types might […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Gambling with RPC 1.8(a) is always risky.

It is not often that you get decisions out of any of the second highest courts in the land that turn on application of an attorney ethics rule, so it can be important to highlight when such events occur. Given how many lawyers and law firms overlook the interrelationship between RPC 1.5 and RPC 1.8(a), […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Three developments presented in decreasing order of importance.

Last week, the Utah Supreme Court officially approved the most “radical” change in any state’s ethics rules since DC adopted a limited approval for law firms to have partners who are not lawyers several decades ago. The Utah Supreme Court announced its adoption of a package of reforms aimed at improving the access to justice […]