Categories
. Legal ethics

You’ve probably already read this letter…

It’s Tuesday night, October 8, 2019. What are you going to do with your evening? Want to read a letter written by someone who seems pretty clearly like someone who should not be permitted to be a lawyer at all but certainly who fails to understand that being White House Counsel is not the same […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Fettered is almost always better for lawyers.

Fettered is a fun word on a number of levels. It is a word lawyers are usually familiar with when it has a prefix attached to it and gets used when we talk about disclosures or access as being “unfettered.” But, it is also a word that literally means “to be restrained with chains,” so […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

But why though?

This past week the Tennessee Supreme Court proposed revisions to the rules of disciplinary enforcement that would transform disbarment into an irrevocable form of discipline in Tennessee and that would extend the potential length of a suspension from 5 years maximum to 10 years maximum. Which leads me to the highly-technical title of this post: […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

I always knew I’d be headlining music festivals one day.

That’s not true at all. I never even imagined I’d be the headliner at a music festival. After this year’s AmericanaFest in Nashville though, everything has changed. Well, that’s actually still pretty misleading as I was not the headliner at AmericanaFest. I did, however, get to be a speaker during AmericanaFest, as part of a […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

One possible answer: Radical transparency in design for legal services?

So, this post isn’t exactly about legal ethics. Of course, it isn’t exactly not about legal ethics. I’ve written a bit here recently about various jurisdictions launching increasingly bolder initiatives to try to reform the regulatory landscape when it comes to the delivery of legal services. Many critical voices of these initiatives demand evidence that […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Can Utahp Arizona?

I know. I’m either: (a) such a sucker for Utah-centric wordplay; (b) a lame, repetitive sort of humorist; or (c) both a and b. But nevertheless today’s post is really important – at least the subject matter of it is – and so it is being designed to try to be short and sweet and […]

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. Legal ethics

TN Supreme Court Vacates Formal Ethics Opinion.

I wrote a little bit about Formal Ethics Opinion 2017-F-163 a couple of years ago when it was first issued. I haven’t said anything here about it since then because I ended up being retained by the Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference to challenge the opinion. Having obtained permission from my client to do so, […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Don’t sleep on Arizona

We’ve (in that creepy royal “we” sort of way) now dedicated two posts to discussing the ATILS proposal coming out of California, but California is certainly not the only state working on reform. In fact, while it may be the biggest, it is not the state offering the boldest reforms, and it also isn’t the […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

California dreaming.

As promised, I’m not done writing about the ATILS initial recommendations that have been put out for public comment in California. In fact, I’m here in San Francisco for the next few days at the APRL meeting where there will also be a public forum about the recommendations on August 10. The public comment period […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Shimkonicity (shim-ko-nis-a-tee)

When I first read some reporting about this decision from Ohio involving the indefinite suspension of a lawyer, I expected it to come across very much as an obvious case of a lawyer’s third strike leading to a steep punishment. But, the coming together of so many things with respect to this lawyer’s situation actually […]