This week sees a rare instance of media publicity regarding something perceived to itself be a rare event (but for which it is difficult to prove that the perception is also reality) – the rejection of a negotiated conditional guilty plea in a lawyer discipline case that had been approved by a hearing panel, and […]
Category: Legal ethics
Categories
The Opposite of a Role Model
I am very pleased to be one of the speakers at tomorrow’s 2015 TBA Litigation Section annual seminar in Nashville. I’ll be spending an hour in the afternoon providing some ethics education (hopefully with some entertainment sprinkled in) using the multitude of mistakes and misdeeds of a particular lawyer who practiced outside of Tennessee until, […]
This news out of Washington state is an unfortunate development if you had hopes that the concept of Limited License Legal Technicians (LLTs) might be a more broadly adopted cure for the “justice gap” that ails the profession in many parts of the country. Washington state’s decision to permit lawyers to share attorney fees with […]
This is not a political blog, nor even a civil rights law blog. So, there would be no reason for me to write a word here that has anything to do with the Walter Scott incident. But this is a blog about legal ethics and lawyering issues, and the former lawyer for the police officer […]
I am looking forward to the opportunity tomorrow to speak at a seminar put on for, and sponsored by, the young lawyer’s division of the Tennessee Bar Association. I will get to speak about ethics issues that can arise when dealing with difficult counsel. I’m hoping I haven’t been invited in order to be the […]
The story of a Virginia lawyer who has now been suspended for 6 months as a result of apparently drinking and being drunk while in attendance at a CLE event is making the rounds. There is a part of me that is a bit surprised that something like this does not happen more often […]
Another of the lawyers I spoke about some at last year’s Ethics Roadshow is back in the news. As an example of the power of disciplinary authorities to pursue emergency suspensions on an indefinite basis when a lawyer is perceived to be a threat to the public, we highlighted the travails of a Florida lawyer […]
On March 31, the Tennessee Supreme Court prudently decided not to turn Tennessee’s mechanism for lawyers to provide information about how much pro bono they perform each year into a mandatory obligation. Mandatory reporting could have placed lawyers at risk of the administrative suspension of their license for being unwilling to provide such information. […]
Categories
Social media and advertising issues
Another bar association has recently issued an ethics opinion over whether/how lawyers can make use of particular types of social media, whether such use constitutes advertising, and related issues. The particular ethics opinion in question was issued March 10, 2015 by the New York County Lawyers Association and deals with LinkedIn. Many of the questions addressed […]
In my first post on the heels of the filing of the pending BLE petition earlier this month, I made reference to Tennessee’s attorney licensing system being broken. The primary problem is that language in Rule 7 makes obtaining licensing by comity (i.e. waiving in without having to take TN’s bar examination) a practical impossibility. Currently, […]