So, I’m doing everything I can to only write about this stuff occasionally, but the latest stunt in connection with the ongoing investigations into the current administration requires at least some discussion – not just because of the brazen hypocrisy (after all the ethics rules do not prohibit lawyers from being hypocrites) but because the […]
So within the last few days the New York State Bar Association has issued an interesting new ethics opinion addressing a variation of an issue that is straightforward nearly everywhere. Lawyers tend to know that conflicts questions can often be complicated but that there is at least one that is pretty straightforward: different lawyers in […]
As I inch ever closer to my 400th blogpost here, today’s offering is something of a companion piece to a post I wrote almost exactly 13 months ago that demonstrates what should be an obvious point, what is a very important point in the world of disciplinary defense but much less obvious, and at least […]
It’s Tuesday night, October 8, 2019. What are you going to do with your evening? Want to read a letter written by someone who seems pretty clearly like someone who should not be permitted to be a lawyer at all but certainly who fails to understand that being White House Counsel is not the same […]
Fettered is a fun word on a number of levels. It is a word lawyers are usually familiar with when it has a prefix attached to it and gets used when we talk about disclosures or access as being “unfettered.” But, it is also a word that literally means “to be restrained with chains,” so […]
This past week the Tennessee Supreme Court proposed revisions to the rules of disciplinary enforcement that would transform disbarment into an irrevocable form of discipline in Tennessee and that would extend the potential length of a suspension from 5 years maximum to 10 years maximum. Which leads me to the highly-technical title of this post: […]
That’s not true at all. I never even imagined I’d be the headliner at a music festival. After this year’s AmericanaFest in Nashville though, everything has changed. Well, that’s actually still pretty misleading as I was not the headliner at AmericanaFest. I did, however, get to be a speaker during AmericanaFest, as part of a […]
So, this post isn’t exactly about legal ethics. Of course, it isn’t exactly not about legal ethics. I’ve written a bit here recently about various jurisdictions launching increasingly bolder initiatives to try to reform the regulatory landscape when it comes to the delivery of legal services. Many critical voices of these initiatives demand evidence that […]
I know. I’m either: (a) such a sucker for Utah-centric wordplay; (b) a lame, repetitive sort of humorist; or (c) both a and b. But nevertheless today’s post is really important – at least the subject matter of it is – and so it is being designed to try to be short and sweet and […]
I wrote a little bit about Formal Ethics Opinion 2017-F-163 a couple of years ago when it was first issued. I haven’t said anything here about it since then because I ended up being retained by the Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference to challenge the opinion. Having obtained permission from my client to do so, […]