On April 1, 2026, a press release issued about a Tennessee lawyer getting suspended for what primarily appears to be misconduct in connection with withdrawing from representation of a client of a type I’ve written about in the past. The matter involved a lawyer in Washington County, Tennessee* who, in seeking to withdraw from the […]
I’ve lamented before that it seems like I could spend every day writing about another example of lawyers not learning the obvious lesson that using generative AI in connection with legal research or writing court filings is more trouble than it is worth. Even if the toll that GAI is taken on the planet weren’t […]
And not just a fun clownshow like maybe you’d be able to see back in the heyday of Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey. No, as of March 2026, the DOJ is fully a clownshow in service of one petty, shitty man. I hate that this is where we find ourselves. I also hate that there […]
A fundamental precept for lawyers ought to be that, when it comes to clients, the only things that are worse than neglecting them are lying to them and stealing from them. For a shorthand version of that, if you find yourself failing to communicate with a client for 57 days (you know, the amount of […]
The Tennessee appellate courts are kind of on a roll (if 2 in one month can be characterized as a “roll”) in issuing opinions making educational points about the Tennessee ethics rules. The latest example is a decision from the Tennessee Supreme Court highlighting a reality that lots of lawyers in Tennessee (and elsewhere) continue […]
Are you sitting down? You should probably sit down so that the shock isn’t too much. I’ll wait. Ok. Now that you are sitting down. It does not appear that the bar regulators in my state are very interested in holding powerful lawyers accountable for their conduct. Readers of the blog know that on Monday […]
Pursuant to my commitment that every time a new Pope is elected, there will be a new post here on the blog, here’s a post while everyone still has papal fever. And, as a bonus almost justifying the attempt to tie these events together, there will be Pope content. I’ve dedicated entire posts in the […]
So, from time to time I have really thought about writing something about how much a particular column series in a major legal ethics publication bothers me. If you read the title of this post, and you have access to a subscription to Legal Ethics Law360, then you probably already know which one I am […]
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 […]
I’ve written once before about the dynamics for disciplinary defense lawyers in trying to work through precedent based on limited information when a variety of disparate conduct by lawyers all results in the same level of discipline. In that post, the variety of discipline was public censure. And you won’t be shocked to hear that […]