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 […]