Categories
. Legal ethics

Outside counsel guidelines and term limits

While I am on something of a short streak of writing about people much more famous and influential than I am, it seems as good a time as any to offer my thoughts about the article that two very fine lawyers with Hinshaw & Culbertson wrote for The Professional Lawyer in 2017 about even more aspects of […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

A sad day in the world of legal ethics

Professor Ronald Rotunda, a legend in the field of legal ethics, has passed away at the age of 73 from complications of pneumonia.  You can read a bit about the man here. I disagreed strongly with Professor Rotunda’s politivcal views, but when it came to the world of legal ethics he was amazingly influential, highly […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

An object lesson about “staying in your lane.”

Prominent technology blogger, Robert Ambrogi, has taken to Above the Law to criticize the latest ABA Formal Ethics Opinion.  In addition to attempting to savage it over being somehow untimely since lawyers have been blogging for almost 20 years, his primary substantive criticism of the opinion is that it makes no sense for an ethics rule […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Another good opinion from the ABA SCEPR

This was not what I originally planned to write about today, but … here we are all the same. Today, the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility released a new opinion and, because it relates to social media, it is generating a good deal of discussion online.  It is being rolled out and […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

That escalated … but not all that quickly.

You’ve likely already read something this week about the Florida lawyer who was disbarred last month as the culmination of his “cumulative and escalating misconduct,” so I don’t know that I have anything truly unique to offer about the situation. But because I so clearly remember talking about the first event in his series of […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Preparing for disbarment.

The panel I was fortunate enough to participate in at the meeting of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers in Vancover earlier this month has received a very good write up appearing in a Bloomberg Law publication.  You can go read it here.  We talked about a number of things other than the looming GDPR deadline, […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

An incredibly unhelpful ethics opinion from Colorado

Were you looking for something that is very well-written but entirely unhelpful to your needs as a lawyer?  Well, you’ve come to the right place today. Wait, I now see how that paragraph could be misconstrued in an entirely unflattering way and as an inadvertent passing of judgment on this whole blog.  Obviously, I didn’t […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

My 300th Post. The shady “Stormy” story gets shadier.

If you had told me back in March 2015 when I started this blog that my 300th blogpost would struggle with trying to decide which angle of a statement to The New York Times made by a personal attorney for the 45th President of the United States about paying $130,000 to a porn star to apparently buy […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Idaho why I insist on punny titles.

So, those familiar with this space may remember I have written a bit from time-to-time about Tennessee’s proposed rule revision to adopt a modified version of ABA Model Rule 8.4(g).  The future of the proposal is still up in the air and the public comment period continues to run until March 21, 2018.  If you […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Friday follow up. Good news and bad news.

I seem to be trending toward this model of one new/fresh substantive post early in the week and one of these “FFU” posts at the end of the week, but I’m not sure if this is a rut or my script going forward.  A very intelligent and thoughtful lawyer asked me while I was in […]