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 […]
Category: Legal ethics
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]