In the middle of Roadshowing (short break until the next stops next week) and also still trying to handle client matters to boot, so this will be a quick post.
(If you are here next week looking for the Roadshow playlist, just keep scrolling down as it can be found in the post immediately below this one.)
The dustup between the smartphone app known as TIKD and the Florida Bar has been back in the news in the legal trades recently over a motion to disqualify TIKD’s counsel filed by the Florida Bar.
On its face, it sounds like a pretty decent disqualification motion on the merits as the Florida Bar is alleging that TIKD’s counsel who is a former Florida Bar president had access during his term in office to internal information evaluating the Florida Bar’s antitrust liability exposure given its structure in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in an antitrust suit against the board that regulates dentistry in North Carolina. (You might recall that I wrote a bit about that in the past as well as it is that case that has revived interest in, and concerns about, antitrust issues for the regulation of the practice of law in unified bar/mandatory bar jurisdictions.) That would seem like a slam-dunk in terms of disqualification if that person had been a former General Counsel or otherwise a lawyer for the Florida Bar, but the analysis may be a lot murkier if, as is the case generally of bar presidents, that the president of the Florida Bar is always a lawyer but isn’t necessarily acting as a lawyer for the organization during the term of office.
Oh, and speaking of the U.S. Supreme Court, I wrote a bit earlier this year (as many other people did) about the weirdness associated with the fact that the United States Supreme Court made the very unfortunate mistake of suspending the wrong attorney – confusing one lawyer named Christopher P. Sullivan for another lawyer named Christopher P. Sullivan. At the time, I tried to make discussing the circumstances a bit more worthwhile substantively and not just anact of piling-on by citing that epic mistake by the highest court in the land as maybe the ultimate example of the need for people in our profession to be deliberate in their actions and take their time because what we do can have real consequences for us and for others.
As is of course true for literally billions of other people on the planet, the Clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court is not a dedicated reader of this space (or didn’t take heed of that message) as a new story came to light a week or so ago of pretty much the same thing happening again with the Court suspending a lawyer named Jim Robbins instead of a lawyer named James A. Robbins. (Even more coincidentally, the Sullivan who was wrongly suspended earlier in 2017 practiced law with a firm called Robins Kaplan.)
Actually, to say that pretty much the same thing happened isn’t quite right, as the James A. Robbins that deserved to be suspended wasn’t actually a member of the U.S. Supreme Court bar at all.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have been admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court since December 2008 and even more fortunately it appears to be an admittee with a name, Brian S. Faughnan, that seems highly unlikely to be duplicated on (or off) its rolls.