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 […]

Categories
Legal ethics

You have to unring a bell the right way & you really can only do it once.

Welcome to 2024 y’all. Lawyers spend an inordinate (but not actually unduly excessive) amount of time worried about making mistakes that involve sending the wrong information to the wrong people. For lawyers in most U.S. jurisdictions, the ethics rules do not provide truly comprehensive guidance about how to fix such a mistake because the ethics […]

Categories
Legal ethics

New York States of Mind

Let’s end 2023 on a high note, shall we? Governor Hochul must be high. She just vetoed a bill that would have finally ended New York’s requirement that New York lawyers have to have an office in New York. Yes, you heard that right. Despite all of the talk in the legal profession of the […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Fifth Shortcircuit on AI?

It is very hard to get very far in any sort of “end of year” evaluation of legal ethics questions without talking about the rise of generative AI, how to use it ethically, and what its rapid (and continuing) development will mean for the practice of law. I’ve written earlier this year about the unfortunate […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Welcome to a new type of post

We will call it: An update on something I could have sworn I wrote about but didn’t. After some events in Tennessee that I did write about, a number of petitions were filed to seek to enact some changes to rules in Tennessee related to the admission of attorneys. The first filing in the series […]