This is going to be a short update offered on a Friday for any weekend reading needs you may be facing. A bit back (on Back to the Future day actually) I mentioned (almost as only an aside) the pilot project that the ABA was launching in cooperation with Rocket Lawyer to offer a limited-scope […]
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I like a well written, helpful ethics opinion as much as the next guy. Probably more so, given the statistically low likelihood that anyone standing near me at a given time is also a male lawyer who commits a significant part of their practice to legal ethics and professional responsibility matters. I think I’ve also […]
Given that there isn’t a lot going on in the news that relates to legal issues, I feel obligated to offer lawyers something to read. (I don’t think I’ve ever gone on record here about how badly I wish someone would create and implement a sarcasm font upon which all users could agree. Maybe it […]
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. – Ferris Bueller Back in December 2015, during my Ethics Roadshow I talked a little bit about one of the items that had been rolled out for public comment by the ABA Commission on the Future […]
Thanks to ESPN I’ve long known more about Johnny Manziel than I care to. But, this past week, I learned something I really should never know — why his agent decided to fire Manziel as his client. Up until this past week, Erik Burkhardt was Manziel’s agent. Burkhardt is a law school graduate, but from […]
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Airing the profession’s dirty laundry
Ok, let’s talk about the 60 Minutes piece that aired this past Sunday. If you haven’t watched it, by all means you should — it is worth the 20-30 minutes of your time. You can watch it here. As always, I’ll wait until you get done and come back. Now, it seems beyond dispute that the […]
Two recent events have brought me back around to wanting to talk about ethics issues raised by this fascinating documentary. One event is public and absurd. The other event was semi-private and surprising (at least to me). As neither of the recent events are actually the thing I wanted to talk about a couple of […]
So far this month, the Professional Ethics Committee for the State Bar of Texas has put out two ethics opinions worthy of some discussion given the issues tackled and the outcomes of each opinion. The more recent of the two, Opinion No. 653, evaluates whether a lawyer acting pro se in a matter has to […]
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A Rorschach test in two parts
To pass the time during Snowmageddon (Snowpocalypse?), here’s a blogpost equivalent of an ink blot test. Do you think either of these situations (or both) (or neither) involve situations where disciplinary authorities should be allocating resources to go after lawyers under the ethics rules? The first inkblot: An attorney runs advertisements for his bankrutpcy practice […]
Some time ago, I wrote a bit about how existing ethics rules make attempting to use Kickstarter to launch a law firm not a viable option. The primary problem with using crowdsourcing to raise funds to start a law practice is the prohibition in the ethics rules on nonlawyer ownership or investment in law firms. […]