Categories
. Legal ethics

More on the BLE’s petition for rule changes

This will be the first of several more in-depth entries focused on the Board of Law Examiners’ petition seeking some changes to Tenn. Sup. Ct. R. 7, which deals with a collection of licensing issues in Tennessee.  (This will also be one of those less frequent posts where I may not adhere strictly to my […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

A 2014 Ethics Roadshow update

For those of you who may have watched my 2014 Ethics Roadshow in person or online, you may recall that one of the lawyers whose plight we discussed was the former General Counsel for South Carolina State University.  He had been indefinitely suspended from practice after pleading guilty to misprision of a felony arising from […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Board of Law Examiners – March 12, 2015 petition to overhaul Rule 7

Depending on what type of law practice setting you work in, you may or may not be aware of the several ways in which Tennessee’s system for licensing lawyers is a bit … I believe the technical word is “broken.” Yesterday, the Board of Law Examiners filed a petition to seek to have the Tennessee […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Post-discharge communications with jurors

To clarify about that forthcoming revision to the comment to RPC 3.5(c) w/r/t restrictions on communicating with discharged jurors after trial: it impacts only the ability of trial court’s to enter routine orders — such as standing orders or local rule provision — that would place jurors off-limits from lawyers after discharge.  It will not […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

More potential advertising issues (of a sort) on the horizon

As something of a follow-up post about the expansion of the existing 30-day prohibition on certain solicitation efforts that the Tennessee Supreme Court has now ordered, it likely is worth noting that the existing 30-day restriction in the ethics rules tied to just disasters and personal injury matters has always itself been somewhat controversial among […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

TN’s Approach to Nonrefundable Fees – A Reminder

Near the end of February 2015, the New York City Bar put out its Formal Opinion 2015-2 evaluating a question of propriety of a flat, nonrefundable monthly fee in a retainer agreement and reached the conclusion that a particular one that was something of a “hybrid” was problematic.  Although the NYC opinion makes for a […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Two ethics rule revisions on the way … one good, one not-so-much

After putting proposals out for public comment in 2014, the Tennessee Supreme Court in the span of a week in February 2015 ordered changes to Tennessee’s lawyer ethics rules that will each take effect on May 1, 2015.  For those lawyers who favor a robust view of lawyer speech rights, the two orders present a […]