The story of a Virginia lawyer who has now been suspended for 6 months as a result of apparently drinking and being drunk while in attendance at a CLE event is making the rounds. There is a part of me that is a bit surprised that something like this does not happen more often […]
Another of the lawyers I spoke about some at last year’s Ethics Roadshow is back in the news. As an example of the power of disciplinary authorities to pursue emergency suspensions on an indefinite basis when a lawyer is perceived to be a threat to the public, we highlighted the travails of a Florida lawyer […]
On March 31, the Tennessee Supreme Court prudently decided not to turn Tennessee’s mechanism for lawyers to provide information about how much pro bono they perform each year into a mandatory obligation. Mandatory reporting could have placed lawyers at risk of the administrative suspension of their license for being unwilling to provide such information. […]
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Social media and advertising issues
Another bar association has recently issued an ethics opinion over whether/how lawyers can make use of particular types of social media, whether such use constitutes advertising, and related issues. The particular ethics opinion in question was issued March 10, 2015 by the New York County Lawyers Association and deals with LinkedIn. Many of the questions addressed […]
In my first post on the heels of the filing of the pending BLE petition earlier this month, I made reference to Tennessee’s attorney licensing system being broken. The primary problem is that language in Rule 7 makes obtaining licensing by comity (i.e. waiving in without having to take TN’s bar examination) a practical impossibility. Currently, […]
It’s also in the mail to subscribers, but you can access the new issue here (my column is at pp. 28-29). My piece discusses the plot of a favorite book of mine as well as relatively recent changes made to the ethics rules about conflicts rooted in lawyers’ family relationships. I’d also encourage you to […]
UPDATED TO ADD LINK The Tennessee Supreme Court has put out an order today soliciting public comments on that BLE petition proposing changes to Rule 7 and a few other rules. Deadline for submission of public comments is July 31, 2015. I’ve already written about some aspects of the petition on a number of occasions […]
It is not every day that a contempt case against a Tennessee lawyer gets some national coverage, but it also is not every day that a celebrity former television judge and former candidate for District Attorney has a criminal contempt ruling and sentence of 5 days in jail against him affirmed on appeal. The appellate […]
I tend to think my credentials as a fan of the First Amendment are pretty solid. But I feel like I’m standing on pretty solid ground in saying that a lawyer’s effort to pursue a ballot initiative that calls for the murder of people, if it were going on in Tennessee, would justify discipline against […]
Pretty quick on the heels of this prior post, we now have a further development from the West Coast on the potential utility of limited license legal technicians, i.e. “nurse practitioners for the legal profession,” in providing better access to justice. The California State Bar has now put out for public comment a number of proposals […]