Categories
Legal ethics

Beyond disbarred in Colorado

Stop me if I’ve said this before … but I’m a bad blogger. With that out of the way, here is something exceedingly rare and that caught my attention — a court ordering that a lawyer, who had already been disbarred, was now no longer entitled to even file things in court on a pro […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Some quick sanctions updates for your reading pile

I know from years of representing lawyers that when you are facing sanctions against you it is awful difficult to spend much time thinking about things other than what is going to happen to you. So, although there are a lot more important things going on in the world right now, today’s content is just […]

Categories
Legal ethics

What’s a public censure when you’re shameless?

So, I’ve been starting and stopping a post about the most recent ABA Formal Ethics Opinion to be released. Partly, because the opinion is a bit pedestrian generally involving weighing in on a situation that is largely always an “it depends” on factors that are hard to spell out in an ethics opinion and partly […]

Categories
Judicial Ethics Legal ethics

Secret recordings can be good. Electing judges kind of can’t.

So, the reasons secret recordings will always happen in “one-party” recording states is that they get to the truth. Lots of people do not like them though. And judges absolutely loathe the notion of being secretly recorded. They do not like them so much that sometimes no matter what the secret recording reveals they will […]

Categories
Judicial Ethics

Doubting Thomas.

An alternate, much longer, but likely much more salient title for this post is “What’s a democracy supposed to do when a sitting United States Supreme Court Justice is okay with democracy being threatened?” That’s right kids, today we are going to talk a bit about judicial ethics and remind everyone that we currently do […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Louisiana remains a legal embarrassment.

There are a lot of dumpster fire situations going on these days that have direct or indirect relationships to legal ethics. Frankly, there are too many to make it easy to decide which ones to think it makes sense to spend time writing about here. There is the seemingly evergreen issue of Donald Trump continually […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Should racists be permitted to practice law?

This is a question I’ve asked in the past. It is not instinctively an easy question to wrestle with. It can easily boil over into various slippery-slope arguments and accusations regarding risk of inviting concepts of the “thought police” and the like. But another news item invites the question back into the arena for further discussion. This ABA […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Bad judgment leads to bad judgment.

A Tennessee disciplinary matter has made some national news this past week, so what I am writing about might be something you’ve heard about already. It involves a Tennessee lawyer who has been given a 4-year suspension from practice, with one-year of active suspension for providing advice over Facebook to a woman about how she […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

When you’re right, you’re right. Even when you’re Right.

I’ve written a bit in the past about the differences between unified bars, like what exists in North Carolina, and voluntary state bar associations such as what we have in Tennessee. (If you are uninterested in clicking on either of those links, as a refresher, the fundamental difference is that unified bars require that anyone […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Threats to the legal profession include threats by members of the profession

This post is coming late in the week because this week marked the first two stops on the Ethics Roadshow for 2018.  (If you are in or near Memphis and Nashville you can still register to come attend next week’s stops and hear about a potential recipe for ethical lawyering involving the 5 Cs of […]