Earlier this month, and again in a fashion that seems a bit more in keeping with NOT wanting people to know they’ve been released rather than to give advice and guidance intended to be disseminated far and wide, the Board of Professional Responsibility here in Tennessee issued two new Formal Ethics Opinions. The only way […]
With the flood of comments in opposition, and particularly the fact that the Attorney General of our state felt the need to file not just one but two comments in opposition, the unsuccessful end of the effort to convince the Tennessee Supreme Court to adopt a version of RPC 8.4(g) has felt inevitable for the […]
I can’t believe I’m doing this as neither of these people deserve any benefit of the doubt or serious treatment afforded for their contentions. But, based on spending time on the web reading comments (despite the always-spot-on advice “don’t read the comments”), there are so incredibly many people who do not understand these concepts and, […]
There is an awful lot to like and agree with in this post from Dan Lear, one of the folks who have been the face of Avvo for quite some time. But there is a piece of it that is just simply wrong, and while it would be hyperbole to say it is dangerously wrong, it […]
Lawyers billing clients on the basis of time spent is less than ideal for all involved. For lawyers, it isn’t the best proxy for value delivered in terms of service and incentivizes inefficiency. For clients, it isn’t the best proxy of value received in terms of service and leaves clients feeling like the only way […]
So, I don’t know if any of you have ever played HQ Trivia. In any session, they have between 500,000 and almost 2 million players, so statistically speaking, I guess there is a chance you have. While it has nothing to do with legal ethics, in order to understand the context of what follows, let […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]