Frankly, civil behavior by lawyers toward other lawyers certainly is on the list of things the world needs a healthy dose of, but, well, let’s just say maybe it’s not a top-10 item on the list. So, the point of today’s post is not to be the guy who claims that lawyers shouldn’t have to […]
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Main(e)ly an excuse for book promotion.
So, before offering up the actual ethics content, if like me you know you’re not quite hitting on all cylinders but you are functional and you haven’t already read that New York Times article that made the rounds about “languishing.” I’d recommend it. You can still get to the article at this link. You might […]
It still exists, of course. No real surprises there. In just the last two weeks, there have been multiple stories that drive that point home. One such story, while admittedly actually involving a sitting judge rather than a practicing lawyer, is this one out of Colorado. Another such story involves a New York lawyer who […]
Let’s talk for a bit today about a proposed California ethics opinion for which public comment is being accepted until June 8, 2021. The general topic when you hear about the proposed opinion is immediately of interest — can a lawyer help a client obtain a contractual agreement including a provision that is against the […]
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Brooding about ethics.
So, it’s been a minute or so since my last content. You’ve probably moved on and found a new favorite ethics blog. It’s probably Michael Kennedy’s actually, he’s been relentless with content in March 2021. You might be wondering what has happened to keep me from writing over these last 20 or so days. First, […]
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What decade is it again?
So, the experience of the last year of pandemic life has messed with a lot of people’s ability to remember when certain things happened. For some people, remembering events of the last year are not the problem as much as remembering when certain things happened in the before times. For others, short term memory of […]
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“Here’s a new post.” (cleaned up)
I have tried for the better part of a week to convince myself that I needed to write something about the most recent ABA Formal Ethics Opinion which was released in February 2021 and which attempts to explain what “materially adverse” means in the context of ABA Model Rule 1.9 (and Model Rule 1.18). I […]
This space has focused on a number of occasions on the difficulties for lawyers in dealing with certain forms of negative publicity. I won’t link to all of those past stories for a variety of reasons. (If you are stuck at home both because of the pandemic and winter weather and are looking for things […]
Lawyers and law firms have long struggled – at least during the length of my career – with whether they can, or should, include a provision in their contracts with clients that would require arbitration of some, or all, kinds of disputes. In situations where a local or state bar association offers a free, voluntary […]
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Bad judgment leads to bad judgment.
A Tennessee disciplinary matter has made some national news this past week, so what I am writing about might be something you’ve heard about already. It involves a Tennessee lawyer who has been given a 4-year suspension from practice, with one-year of active suspension for providing advice over Facebook to a woman about how she […]