Categories
. Legal ethics

If it ever will come to pass, the states will have to serve as the laboratories.

Two weeks ago, I offered some thoughts on the latest flare-up in the long-running off-and-on ABA exploration of the third-rail of the practice of law: potential non-lawyer ownership/investment in law firms.  This time around, before I could even manage to finish reading all of the comments and try to write some thoughts about the comments, […]

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. Legal ethics

Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, and Seeing If I Can Put a Dent In Figuring Out What Is Next for Law.

When you allow yourself to ponder just how quickly technological advances have changed the daily life of a lawyer, it becomes pretty easy to speculate about just how foreign the daily life of a lawyer 10 years from now will be when compared to what it is today.  When I stop to think about the […]

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. Legal ethics

Independence of professional judgment, and other thoughts spurred by the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services

April 2016 has brought another iteration of a seemingly, endless, (yet kind of potentially pointless unless you think the politics of the situation will somehow play out differently from the past) debate: whether some entity within the ABA is attempting to usher into reality a world in which people other than lawyers will be allowed […]

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. Legal ethics

Three updates for the Thursday before Tax Day

Back in September, I wrote a bit about some different perspectives on the purpose of lawyer regulation and commented on a story that discussed a proposal that Colorado had in the works.  On April 7, 2016, The Colorado Supreme Court took action to adopt a new “Preamble” that serves as the introduction to its rules […]

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. Legal ethics

Panama Papers – a worst case scenario for the development of cyber liability law for law firms?

It’s an old adage that bad facts make bad law. In the last few weeks, a good number of pieces were written focusing heightened attention on an issue that many lawyers were already stewing about . . . technological vulnerabilities arising from how lawyers and law firms use (and don’t use) technology.  Most of these […]

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. Legal ethics

ABA Law Connect post-mortem. ♫ Five. Five dollar. Five dollar not long. ♫

This is going to be a short update offered on a Friday for any weekend reading needs you may be facing. A bit back (on Back to the Future day actually) I mentioned (almost as only an aside) the pilot project that the ABA was launching in cooperation with Rocket Lawyer to offer a limited-scope […]

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. Legal ethics

The Wisdom of Ferris Bueller. The reality of Machiavelli.

Life moves pretty fast.  If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. – Ferris Bueller Back in December 2015, during my Ethics Roadshow I talked a little bit about one of the items that had been rolled out for public comment by the ABA Commission on the Future […]

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. Legal ethics

Airing the profession’s dirty laundry

Ok, let’s talk about the 60 Minutes piece that aired this past Sunday.  If you haven’t watched it, by all means you should — it is worth the 20-30 minutes of your time.  You can watch it here.  As always, I’ll wait until you get done and come back. Now, it seems beyond dispute that the […]

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. Legal ethics

Avvo Legal Services won’t work in Tennessee without RPC 7.6 compliance, but should it be so?

The evolution of Avvo from its origins as a lawyer-rating service to something with a much, much more extensive impact in the legal marketplace continued this week with the news of the launch of Avvo Legal Services.  Robert Ambrogi was, as often is the case, the first to break the news online about the development, […]

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. Legal ethics

This probably is (but maybe shouldn’t be) the least discussed ethics rule.

I remain surprised that RPC 2.1 is so rarely discussed when it comes to ethics rules.  It’s not really a scientific or fair way of justifying my point, but if you were to go search the website of the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility for “2.1,” it will inform you “There were no results found. […]