Categories
. Legal ethics

Baby steps, but still a positive development

From time to time, I have been asked questions about whether lawyers needed to be doing anything (or even could do anything) to try to better guarantee protections of client communications and maintain privilege and confidentiality in the world after the news started to come out about just how broad the NSA’s surveillance operations appeared […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Traps for the unwary – Mid-stream changes to your client’s fee agreement

When lawyers think about problematic business transactions with a client, they usually think about things like loans or, perhaps, situations in which a lawyer is joining a client as an investor in a business venture.  The ethics rule regarding business transactions with clients, RPC 1.8(a), is broader in its coverage than just those situations and, […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Another wrinkle from that malpractice insurance coverage opinion

Earlier this week, I wrote about the scariness that can come with understanding another way that lawyers’ fates are tied together when they practice law in the same firm: one lawyer failing to disclose a known problem on a malpractice renewal application could lead to loss of coverage for all of the other lawyers in […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

An unsettling insurance decision if you practice in a law firm of any size.

The month of April 2015 brought a declaration from a legal consultant that he anticipates seeing a 10,000 lawyer law firm within five years.  Trying to determine if there would ever be a law firm so big that from a conflicts perspective its operation was fundamentally unworkable might be an interesting intellectual exercise to undertake, but […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

A promised update about that CLEUI/CLEWI situation.

A little while back, I posted about a Virginia lawyer who had been suspended after being drunk and disruptive while attending a CLE.  At the time, I speculated about what the ethics infraction might have been – making a false statement in terms of filling out the paperwork on attendance.  I was in the ballpark, […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Why blog posts aren’t, and shouldn’t try to be, solicitations of clients.

So this little blogpost from a Michigan bankruptcy attorney that went viral would be a perfect example to use to answer a question I get asked quite frequently:  When do I have to worry about something I post online being treated as a solicitation of a client under the ethics rules?  It would be a […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

TN Supreme Court rejects proposed resolution of disciplinary case as too lenient

This week sees a rare instance of media publicity regarding something perceived to itself be a rare event (but for which it is difficult to prove that the perception is also reality) – the rejection of a negotiated conditional guilty plea in a lawyer discipline case that had been approved by a hearing panel, and […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

The Opposite of a Role Model

I am very pleased to be one of the speakers at tomorrow’s 2015 TBA Litigation Section annual seminar in Nashville.  I’ll be spending an hour in the afternoon providing some ethics education (hopefully with some entertainment sprinkled in) using the multitude of mistakes and misdeeds of a particular lawyer who practiced outside of Tennessee until, […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Washington decides to also let LLLTs share fees and have ownership interest in law firms

This news out of Washington state is an unfortunate development if you had hopes that the concept of Limited License Legal Technicians (LLTs) might be a more broadly adopted cure for the “justice gap” that ails the profession in many parts of the country.  Washington state’s decision to permit lawyers to share attorney fees with […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

A lawyer’s public interview that should never have happened…

This is not a political blog, nor even a civil rights law blog.  So, there would be no reason for me to write a word here that has anything to do with the Walter Scott incident.  But this is a blog about legal ethics and lawyering issues, and the former lawyer for the police officer […]