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, […]

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. Legal ethics

Friday follow up. Good news and bad news.

I seem to be trending toward this model of one new/fresh substantive post early in the week and one of these “FFU” posts at the end of the week, but I’m not sure if this is a rut or my script going forward.  A very intelligent and thoughtful lawyer asked me while I was in […]

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. Legal ethics

Disturbing development in a recent disciplinary case

Late this Summer, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued an opinion, over a dissent, that imposed a public censure against a lawyer for what were, pretty clearly, a series of failures on the part of the lawyer’s staff in the handling of a client’s matter.  What makes the case, Garland v. BPR, interesting, and worthy of that […]

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. Legal ethics

Speaking again of rarer occurrences

Last week I dedicated a post to highlighting some topics of note that I hadn’t written about in a while.  This is another such post as the Tennessee Supreme Court has again taken action on its own initiative to increase discipline against an attorney beyond a result that both the accused attorney and the prosecuting […]

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. Legal ethics

Hey Genis! Don’t do that.

I’ve represented a lot of lawyers over the years in disciplinary proceedings in Tennessee.  It is certainly fair to say that the process is slow when you want it to be fast and sometimes vice versa. I noticed a story that the ABA/BNA Lawyers’ Manual on Professional Conduct ran with that made me realize that the […]

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. Legal ethics

Friday installment of “I beg to differ.”

It has been a long time since I have had reason to strongly disagree with the insights offered by Karen Rubin and company over at their excellent blog – The Law for Lawyers Today – but here we are again. Karen has written a thought-provoking piece about a criminal defense lawyer with a parody Twitter account and […]

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. 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

Rambling and bordering on incoherent is no way to do anything much less make a constitutional challenge.

I have made reference in the past on this blog about the problems that can come from the fact that Tennessee is one of a very few states that still use the “preponderance of the evidence” standard in disciplinary proceedings against lawyers.  Fewer than a dozen jurisdictions including Tennessee still use that standard.  Around forty U.S. […]