Categories
. Legal ethics

Friday Follow Up: Ohio Gets to the Right Outcome on UPL

Almost exactly three months ago, I wrote about what I considered to be a very disturbing ruling in a lawyer admissions case in Ohio.  If you missed that post, you can read it here. I’m pleased to write, in follow-up today, that the Ohio Supreme Court has ultimately gotten to the correct outcome – it […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Utahlking Ethics Opinions to Me? (Also Texas)

I’m interested in writing today about two recent ethics opinions that manage to go together quite nicely.  Utah Ethics Adv. Op. 18-04 and Texas Professional Ethics Committee Op. 679.  Both involve RPC 1.8 (or at least both should).  And, not only does neither opinion do a very good job with the subject matter it tackles […]

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Judicial Ethics

“Let’s put our heads together and start a new country up.”

Serial, perhaps the best known podcast of all podcasts, has recently launched its third season and like one of the REM songs off of Life’s Rich Pageant it focuses on Cuyahoga – but not the river but the County in Ohio – more particularly, it focuses on what goes on inside the Justice Center in Cuyahoga County.  […]

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Judicial Ethics

Proposed revisions to the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges

So last week I was quoted a bit in a Law360 story related to Judge Kavanaugh’s continued effort to ascend to the highest judicial position in our nation.  If you are a subscriber, you can read the article here.  It had to do with the news of the lawyer who was going to be representing […]

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. Legal ethics

Neither a stalker nor a burglar be.

Matters of the heart have caused people lots of problems throughout the course of human history.  Matters of the heart, when the heart is located inside the chest of a lawyer, work pretty much the same way. Of course, sometimes stories that, on the surface, seem like matters of the heart might be more fairly […]

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. Legal ethics

Nebraska demonstrating less patience than Tennessee

Although I live in SEC country, I am a Chelsea FC fan rather than a follower of college football.  So this is not a sly college football reference in my title.  (I am aware that apparently UT lost its first game of the season but have literally no idea whether the Cornhuskers have even played […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Making it up as you go (but for a good cause): Texas State Bar Op. 673

There has been something of a trend of late in terms of ethics opinions focusing on variations on the breadth of the duty of client confidentiality and the inconvenience it creates for lawyers who have bought in to the modern trend of sharing and oversharing when online.  There was this opinion from the ABA and […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Information overload; summer struggles.

Mid-August often feels like summer doldrums.  Yet, there has been so much recent information of interest in the world of legal ethics that it is hard to keep up.  Thus, one can manage to feel simultaneously adrift and overloaded. In that spirit (and because I am that “one”), here are a handful (plus 2) of […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Ridiculous from up close and far away.

I have some real-world experience in trying to help lawyers already admitted in at least one jurisdiction obtain admission to practice here in Tennessee.  My state’s system now is still less than ideal but not necessarily in a way that makes it strikingly more problematic than is the case in many other states.  (In the […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

The end of Avvo Legal Services should not be the end of the discussion.

A lot of the time, saying something seemed “inevitable,” only makes sense to say when you’ve had the benefit of hindsight.  At some level, every outcome can be justified as having been inevitable when you are doing the justifying after the event has already happened. I say that to make clear that I understand the […]