So, I’m getting a very wonderful opportunity to participate in a debate about lawyer advertising in November in Nashville at The Advocates’ Society annual meeting. A throng of lovely Canadian attorneys will be traveling to our state capital for a two-day meeting. I say all of this for two reasons: Reason the first – today […]
Tag: Ethics Opinions
A number of folks have already written about how New York has dealt another setback for Avvo Legal Services in the form of NY State Bar Ethics Op. 1132 which found that New York lawyers could not participate in Avvo Legal Services because payment of Avvo’s marketing fee amounts to payment for recommendation of services […]
This week the New York City Bar has put out a very important, and I think very helpful, ethics opinion to address a real, practical concern for lawyers: what, if anything, can be done to protect confidential client information when traveling and crossing the border into the U.S.? NY City Bar Formal Op. 2017-5 lays […]
My last two posts have focused on the pretty wide-ranging and very thought-provoking work (and work product) of the Oregon State Bar Futures Task Force. I do plan to return to the topics because there is more in that report worth discussion, but we are taking a break from that with this post. Let’s move […]
It is almost three months old now, but I wanted to right a word or two about a really well-constructed ethics opinion issued in Colorado, not just because it is an opinion that deserves to be read, but also because it raises a not-quite-academic question about the phenomenon of captive law firms. The opinion put […]
Two short updates for a Tuesday
Late last month, I focused a post on a West Virginia lawyer who ended up staring down a 2-year suspension over chronic over-billing. If you missed that post, you can read it here. If you read it, you will recall that one of the items discussed was that the Executive Director of the West Virginia […]
Earlier this week I criticized what I consider to be a pretty bad ethics opinion that was issued by Rhode Island. To balance things out a bit, I want to write about an ethics opinion out of Wisconsin that gives the correct answer to its query – Wisconsin Formal Ethics Opinion EF-17-02. That opinion correctly […]
I have perused a lot of ethics opinions over the years. Whether a kind of scenario presents a conflict is a frequent subject of ethics opinions. I don’t think I’ve read many that address whether a particular conflict of interest is fairly treated as a consentable conflict, however. Having now read Rhode Island Ethics Advisory […]
An opinion worthy of discussion was issued in Ohio back in February 2017 but I didn’t stumble across it until this past week. (A tweet by ALAS got it onto my radar screen.) Advisory Opinion 2017-1 from the Ohio Board of Professional Conduct addresses advertisement of contingent fee arrangements and, in particular, it addresses the […]
I have written a few times about the ABA’s adoption of a new Model Rule 8.4(g). One point that was brought up in the run-up to that rule actually finally being adopted was that some more than 20 jurisdictions already had an anti-discrimination rule in place in the black letter of their rules in one […]