Categories
Legal ethics

Can you name all the ABA Model Rules that can never be violated?

Instinctively, if you know your way around the attorney ethics rules, I don’t think the question posed by the title of this post is a particularly hard question. But two incidents I’ve experienced within the last few weeks have caused me to question how well understood it is among the legal community that there are […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Bad Ethics Opinion or the Worst Ethics Opinion? Massachusetts edition

Let’s play a blogpost game we haven’t played in a long time. (Yeah, I know, you’re saying to yourself … well that could be anything since you took all of March 2024 off buddy. A month or so seems long, but it’s actually been almost 7 years since I whipped out the “bad or worst” […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Is North Carolina’s path the future of RPC 1.6?

Okay, so in the interest of full transparency, what I really wanted to write about is the fact that we have a new entrant in the running for “Who is the worst of the Trump lawyers out there?” competition. Among the many things that have come out of the work of the January 6 Committee […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Confidentiality and credit cards

I have written here in the past about a number of ways that a lawyer’s obligation of confidentiality imposes limits on their ability to do certain things that others can do and even as to subject matter where it seems highly unfair. Most frequently, this issue arises when talking with lawyers about what they can […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Another ethics opinion that wouldn’t be required if all lawyers were good (or at least chaotic-neutral) lawyers.

There has been A LOT of stuff going on this week in the world of legal ethics. I will refrain from dedicating an entire post to try to tie this plea I made in a post back in December 2020 to these two developments, here and here. Instead, I want to talk a little bit […]

Categories
Legal ethics

An ethics opinion for Valentine’s Day?

Roses are red. Violets are blue. California has a new ethics opinion about what to do when your client no longer remembers you. I’m no Langston Hughes or Emily Dickinson. I’m not even at the level of say … Spike Milligan. And since it isn’t dated from what I can tell, I cannot be certain […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

The scams evolve. So too must lawyers.

I mentioned in a prior post that I was going to be fortunate enough to preside over the first in-person meeting of APRL in many, many moons last week. I’ve also written in the past about APRL has begun working into its programming items we call “Fred Talks.” These are Focused. Rapid. Ethics. Discussions. Shorter […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

An ode (of sorts) to RPC 1.18 (but only as an example)

Today’s entry is something of a dodge in a way (I sort of wanted to pile on about this and make the point that it is a much sounder development than this was) and something of knocking down a hastily-created strawman in another respect. But what it mostly amounts to is pursuing a not-yet-fully-formed thesis […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Terror in Tennessee.

So somehow, given the time of year and the absolute flood of horrific news we all get exposed to on a daily basis, you might not have heard the news that a suicide bomber detonated a large bomb in the middle of downtown Nashville, Tennessee on Christmas morning. The bomb detonated from the inside of […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Three short burst updates

In case you haven’t yet “checked out” for the week to have what I hope is a makeshift, stay-at-home Thanksgiving banquet to kick-off your holiday weekend, here are four very short but, mostly timely, updates on topics of prior posts. First, the Tennessee Supreme Court has put the TBA advertising rule revisions proposal out for […]