Categories
. Legal ethics

Two developments from the ABA Annual Meeting – which one will have the bigger impact?

The 2016 ABA Annual Meeting continues today and tomorrow but the two actions for which it likely will be most remembered have already transpired.  One happened Monday when, after much public discussion and multiple revisions to the proposal along the way, a final set of proposed revisions to ABA Model Rule 8.4 was approved in […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Traps for the Unwary – Avvo Legal Services Comes to Tennessee

I’ve written previously about the maelstrom of issues presented by Avvo’s expansion from its original core business as a lawyer rating service into new things such as Avvo Legal Services — an arrangement where it makes clients, who will have already paid Avvo for the legal services they want, available directly to lawyers to perform […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Shameless self promotion – 2016 Ethics Roadshow update

Big news … well, the size of the news may be subject to differing opinions, but news. Believe it or not, this year will be the 12th year that I have had the opportunity to do the Ethics Roadshow for lawyers throughout Tennessee.  Since this is my 12th go round at doing three hours of […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Bad blogger – please accept this potpourri like sprinkling of items

The week feels like it is getting away from me, some travel, some work, some personal life, but may be able to write about something more substantive I’ve been meaning to tackle for later this week.  For today, here is a scattershot of stories all of which involve something previously found to be worthwhile enough […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

“Cases Without Counsel” study confirms the obvious but also raises more subtle dilemmas

If all you manage to do was read the headline from the ABA Journal online story today — “Self-represented litigants perceive bias and disadvantage in court process, report finds,” your reaction will likely be limited to “Duh.”  But, there is much more that can be gleaned from this “Cases Without Counsel” study and report that the Institute for […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Radiolab does the “buried bodies” case

Over the last couple of years, like a lot of other people, I have gotten very into listening to podcasts on my way to and from work and on car trips.  Most of what I spend my time listening to is in the comedic vein (MBMBAM, Judge John Hodgman, You Talking U2 to Me), but […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

APRL’s supplemental advertising overhaul proposal

Back in June 2015, I dedicated a post here to praising APRL’s proposal to streamline ethics rules imposing outdated restrictions on lawyer advertising.  A proposal that recognizes that lots of states currently have advertising restrictions on the books that could not survive a constitutional challenge and that aren’t really even being sought to be enforced and […]

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, […]

Categories
. 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 […]

Categories
. 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 […]