Pursuant to my commitment that every time a new Pope is elected, there will be a new post here on the blog, here’s a post while everyone still has papal fever. And, as a bonus almost justifying the attempt to tie these events together, there will be Pope content.
I’ve dedicated entire posts in the past to highlighting the broad range of conduct in Tennessee that can all end up being punished through a public censure. I am not lazy enough to do that again, even though if you go look today at the least disciplinary releases there has been quite a run on public censures in April in Tennessee. (In fact, all 12 instances of public discipline handed down in Tennessee in April 2025 involved public censures.)
Instead, I want to pick out 2 of those 12 for discussion because they involve situations that might seem a bit counterintuitive for some lawyers. Among the reasons to highlight these two situations is to remind folks that it is important to understand that on many occasions there is much more backstory in the mix that you cannot learn simply from reviewing the orders or press releases that come out.
One of the public censures handed down in April involved the issuance of discipline against the lawyer’s license for conduct that actually took place before they were a lawyer. On April 16, 2025, a public censure was imposed against an attorney, Robert Pope (see there’s the payoff and connection to the global topic of the day!), for failing to update his bar application to reflect that he had been terminated from his current place of employment.
Now, most lawyers and law students are well aware that lack of candor in the bar application process can have consequences, but the focus is usually on concerns that the lack of candor will be viewed as a character and fitness problem and potentially deny admission to the bar. Pope’s public censure through demonstrates that there can be other consequences (which are admittedly less dire than being denied admission) and reminds that RPC 8.1 is a disciplinary rule that explicitly extends its scope beyond lawyers to “applicant[s] for admission to the bar.”
The other recent public censure situation of note was actually imposed on multiple lawyers despite the fact that the lawyers deposited funds of disputed ownership into trust. Most of the time lawyers handling disputed funds get themselves into trouble by not putting those funds into trust and instead putting them into their operating account. But for at least two lawyers in middle Tennessee, depositing funds into trust was a sufficiently improper act to result in the issuance of a public censure.
A review of the surface information made available reveals that the problem for the lawyers was that there was a court order that required certain monies that might come in for their business clients to be delivered to a court-ordered custodian for the business. The lawyers were representing two clients involved in a breach of contract lawsuit surrounding the manufacture and sale of COVID-19 test kits.
When $700,000 came to the business in partial settlement of a dispute also involving the sale of COVID-19 test kits was received, instead of delivering to the custodian, the funds were deposited by the lawyers into their trust account. Each public censure indicates that there was an argument made that it was unclear whether the court order applied to those funds, but the public censure also seems to flag that there is more background to the story (in what shape or form of some sort) because of the language indicating that among the things the lawyers failed to do was ask for permission to “deposit the settlement funds in the law firm’s trust account for his clients’ use in the ordinary course of business.”
That seems quite curious because that would not be a legitimate reason for putting the funds into a trust account at all. The justification for putting them into trust would be that to whom they should be paid would be disputed. If they clearly belonged to the clients, then they should not go into trust at all. But taken on its face, the court considered them to be funds that should have gone promptly to the custodian. Importantly though, and consistent with the conclusion that the true nature of the problem was not that the funds were put into trust, is that the violations justifying the public censures did not involve RPC 1.15 but rather RPCs 3.4 and 8.4(d).