Categories
. Legal ethics

Variations on two unfortunate, recurring situations.

Much has been written over the last few years about the risks for lawyers of increasingly sophisticated financial scams targeting them.  I’ve even written about the issue some in the past. Within the last 30 days or so, a “new” financial scam has gotten some publicity that should help real estate lawyers in particular to […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Remember my conversation with the SuperShuttle driver?

A while back I wrote a piece about a relatively deep conversation I had about right and wrong and why lawyers do some really bad things with a SuperShuttle driver in Phoenix.  If you missed it, you can read it here.  But one of the things I didn’t say during that conversation was that there […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Official dishonesty and the consequences for lawyers – 3 of the latest examples

A common theme in many disciplinary proceedings brought against lawyers involves dishonesty.  This should not really be a surprise given that lawyers are human beings and human beings have a tendency toward being dishonest when they can get away with it.  Although there is an ethics rule that, on its face, makes it unethical for […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Don’t be an ass.

Quite a few years ago now, I did a seminar titled something like “The Golden Rule of Litigation” or “Litigation and the Golden Rule.”  One of the fun aspects of putting it together was finding confirmation that some version of The Golden Rule – the “do unto others as you would have them do unto […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Death and disbarment

Returning to the office from the holiday weekend, I noticed these two sad and weird stories of lawyers doing inexcusable things that seem to have common threads of death and disbarment running through them.  Many years ago I wrote a humor column for young lawyers. and you can find some of those columns still floating […]