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 […]

Categories
Legal ethics

A Bridge Too Far to Terabithia

(If the pop culture reference doesn’t automatically make sense to you, you can scroll to the end for an explanation.) In addition to representing lawyers and law firms over the years, I’ve also represented quite a few law students during their application and admissions process and had to handle a few Show Cause hearings where […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Libertarians + Access to Justice = Change?

First of all, I know I am long overdue for new content here. There have been quite a few things that caught my eye that I wanted to write about, but there were so many to choose from it got into a weird, overwhelming, and highly unusual sort of “writer’s block” situation. Second, some anniversaries […]

Categories
Legal ethics

One bad apple spoils bunch? Ethics opinion edition

I’m sure you are familiar with the idiom “One bad apple spoils the bunch” or in some parts of the country “one bad apple spoils the barrel,” but probably not in the context of legal ethics opinions. Someone could (or has) already written versions of posts applying that idiom to lawyers generally and perhaps unethical […]

Categories
Legal ethics

At the intersection of ethics and entrepreneurial acts

A case written up by Mike Frisch earlier this month caught my eye because it involves a discussion of two still-evolving areas of claims that can get made against law firms. Most of the case, and most of what Frisch focuses on, is the malpractice claim that was made regarding an alleged lost opportunity to […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Breaking? BPR Issues Two Formal Ethics Opinions

With little to no fanfare (and in fact I only know they came out because I happened to go look on the website out of curiosity), the BPR has now issued the two opinions it had put out in draft form for public comment earlier this year. Both of these opinions were adopted on August […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Hot Censure Summer in Tennessee

I’ve written once before about the dynamics for disciplinary defense lawyers in trying to work through precedent based on limited information when a variety of disparate conduct by lawyers all results in the same level of discipline. In that post, the variety of discipline was public censure. And you won’t be shocked to hear that […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Wach the Tell?

So, it is trite to say that every picture tells a story. But it is trite for a reason. Here is a simple photo of two pages of the billing entries of the Wachtell Lipton firm in their representation of Twitter against Elon Musk in the Delaware litigation to force him to honor his promise […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Let’s talk about the 3.3 of 303 Creative

So, for folks of my political persuasion, the last week of the Supreme Court term was a real gut punch. Today’s post is not about arguing with anyone over whether the outcome of the 303 Creative decision was or was not correct and is not even about whether the Plaintiff in 303 Creative should have […]