Over the last couple of years, like a lot of other people, I have gotten very into listening to podcasts on my way to and from work and on car trips. Most of what I spend my time listening to is in the comedic vein (MBMBAM, Judge John Hodgman, You Talking U2 to Me), but […]
So, blame my children for the Meghan Trainor reference, but it is a catchy tune and, actually, not the worst of messages of female empowerment. Nevertheless, it fits my ramblings today too well for me to resist. A blurb about a trademark infringement suit involving an Atlanta law firm that operates under a trade name […]
Dishonesty in settlement negotiations
This is a topic I’ve spoken about on a number of times over the years as it can make for a pretty decent CLE presentation. Any such presentation almost always involves use of a hypothetical to explore issues that seem (or at least can sound) academic to a large extent. The usual jumping off point […]
Back in June 2015, I dedicated a post here to praising APRL’s proposal to streamline ethics rules imposing outdated restrictions on lawyer advertising. A proposal that recognizes that lots of states currently have advertising restrictions on the books that could not survive a constitutional challenge and that aren’t really even being sought to be enforced and […]
Two weeks ago, I offered some thoughts on the latest flare-up in the long-running off-and-on ABA exploration of the third-rail of the practice of law: potential non-lawyer ownership/investment in law firms. This time around, before I could even manage to finish reading all of the comments and try to write some thoughts about the comments, […]
There are lots of sources and stories about the escalation of dollars poured into, and spent in, judicial elections in various states. Here’s an April 2016 article about Wisconsin; and here’s an October 2015 press release from a special-interest group made of folks including The Brennan Center. But that isn’t the only thing that makes […]
When you allow yourself to ponder just how quickly technological advances have changed the daily life of a lawyer, it becomes pretty easy to speculate about just how foreign the daily life of a lawyer 10 years from now will be when compared to what it is today. When I stop to think about the […]
April 2016 has brought another iteration of a seemingly, endless, (yet kind of potentially pointless unless you think the politics of the situation will somehow play out differently from the past) debate: whether some entity within the ABA is attempting to usher into reality a world in which people other than lawyers will be allowed […]
I’ve written (quite a long time ago now it seems, but it was only just last Spring) about the unfortunate nature of lawyers calling people who aren’t lawyers “nonlawyers” – rather than referring to them in a less condescending fashion such as “regular people,” for example. But, I still do it all the time, so […]
I’m fortunate enough this week to be in Austin, Texas in order to share a stage with the wonderfully-talented Lynda Shely on Friday to talk for an hour on ethics at the DRI Employment and Labor Law seminar. Working off of a hypothetical that has a “cribbed” from the headlines if not a “ripped” from […]