We here at this blog try not to write about things just for clicks or that revolve around stuff that simply every regular lawyer would know not to do. But the world demands exceptions sometimes, so here I am today addressing a story that popped up right before Turkey Day and that might help suppress […]
Category: Legal ethics
Dot. Dot.Dash (3 updates)
Three updates for you on things that all managed to catch my eye at the same time and all fall into the “I’ve written about this before” category. First, there has now been a ruling in that MSG case where the lawyers for MSG were badly misusing RPC 4.2 to justify barring certain attorneys from […]
New York Disbarment Speedrun
Now to get the obvious first question out of the way: “speedrun” is a term that gamers use to refer to tackling a video game in a manner where the goal is to try to just complete the whole thing as quickly as possible rather than worrying about high scores. If you want to do […]
Again with the “reply all” question.
Ok. The American Bar Association has now weighed in. So, let’s do this. But given how thoroughly I am already on the record on the topic, let’s do it quickly and hopefully efficiently. And, after we’re done, I’ll do some shameless self-promotion. This week the ABA issued Formal Ethics Opinion 503 which tackles a topic […]
Some interesting news today in the intersection of legal ethics and sports. (And technically this makes two straight posts dabbling in that space.) You might recall seemingly forever ago that I posted about a very short lived partnership between the ABA and a company called Rocket Lawyer. If you don’t remember anything about that, you […]
When the MSG doesn’t agree with you.
I’ve had loads of opportunities over the years to write about interpretations of ethics rules with which I disagreed. But the discussion is much less frequently prompted by a party taking a private position outside of litigation (or even a public position in litigation) about what a rule means because … well … that usually […]
“In representing a client” … again
We’ve trod this path before, but the issuance of the most recent ABA Formal Ethics Opinion justifies renewed discussion of the topic. Particularly when the opinion in question is of the rare variety where there is a dissent included in the opinion. The path (our topic): Does Model Rule 4.2 apply to a lawyer when […]
Having just scratched long unscratched itches of topics over which dust has gathered last week, let’s resume talking about more recent topics. Specifically, a topic that is going to need to continue to be bellowed about until we can get it fixed: the flaws in RPC 5.5. Thankfully, we have two further recent situations — […]
There are a lot of dumpster fire situations going on these days that have direct or indirect relationships to legal ethics. Frankly, there are too many to make it easy to decide which ones to think it makes sense to spend time writing about here. There is the seemingly evergreen issue of Donald Trump continually […]
And other crypto bros too, I guess. You may recall in the halcyon days before any of us ever spent any time thinking about pandemics and public health on a daily basis that I wrote about how Nebraska became the first U.S. jurisdiction to issue ethics guidance on whether lawyers could accept payment of fees […]