Categories
. Legal ethics

That escalated … but not all that quickly.

You’ve likely already read something this week about the Florida lawyer who was disbarred last month as the culmination of his “cumulative and escalating misconduct,” so I don’t know that I have anything truly unique to offer about the situation. But because I so clearly remember talking about the first event in his series of […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Preparing for disbarment.

The panel I was fortunate enough to participate in at the meeting of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers in Vancover earlier this month has received a very good write up appearing in a Bloomberg Law publication.  You can go read it here.  We talked about a number of things other than the looming GDPR deadline, […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Husband can’t control his wife, gets disciplined.

Sometimes titles for posts are tough to come up with, sometimes they are far too easy.  This is one of the latter and is offered both with a spirit of tongue-in-cheek silliness and because it is a truly perfect seven-word summary of a recent disciplinary case of note. It is, of note, at least for […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

I Dowd that very much.

Last week was a pretty eventful week in the area where politics and the law overlaps, and an initially bizarre turn of events that was made more bizarre by subsequent claims injected some questions of legal ethics into events on the national stage again. What I’m talking about is all stuff you’ve likely already read […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

What’s in a name?

For example, the folks behind the popular Radiolab podcast also launched a spin-off podcast last year about the U.S. Supreme Court called “More Perfect.”  The reason for naming it that, of course, is that it almost assuredly a reference to the famous line in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution But today it seems a […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

It doesn’t all even out in the Walsh.

Selecting just the right item to write about is not easy.  This is not going to be an instance of accomplishing it.  This is going to be an instance of writing something just because I truly find the outcome astounding (or at least I found the outcome astounding when I first read a blurb about […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

That’s not a Rule 8.4(c) violation. THAT’s a Rule 8.4(c) violation.

In February 2017, more than a dozen law professors filed an ethics complaint against Kellyanne Conway, Counselor to the President, alleging that she violated the attorney ethics rules applicable in D.C. through several false public statement she made — most notably, her repetitive statements about a terrorist incident that never actually occurred – the “Bowling […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Lying about everything is an awful way to go about life.

No, stop, this is not a post about politics.  Not sure why you’d think that just from the title… It’s Groundhog Day here in the United States.  As a person of a certain age, Groundhog Day makes me think of the Bill Murray movie more than the actual parlor trick with a rodent that happens […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Glitch in the TN disciplinary procedural rules?

I got a call a week or two ago from another Tennessee lawyer trying to noodle through a situation.  The caller was curious to see if I could offer any insight about why a situation that seemed a bit broken was not. I couldn’t.  Instead, I was able to sort of confirm for the lawyer […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Redefining what it means to be a “nonlawyer.”

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 […]