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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 […]

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. 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 […]

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. 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 […]

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. 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 […]

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. 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 […]

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. Legal ethics

Time to choose: are you Illinois or New Jersey?

Blackhawks or Devils? Bulls or Nets? Barack Obama or Chris Christie? Northwestern or Rutgers? Kanye or Wu-Tang Clan? Wilco or Bruce Springsteen? Some of those are easy calls; some are harder decisions to make.  What they all have in common though is that one comes out of Illinois and the other comes out of New […]

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. Legal ethics

A tale of two ethics opinions.

So, I’ve made something of a habit of writing about ethics opinions.  Bad ones and good ones.  Mostly bad ones though. As the trite – almost hackish – title of this post telegraphs, today I want to compare and contrast two recently released ethics opinions that manage to demonstrate the good that can come from […]

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. Legal ethics

On wellness: An indirect explanation of last week’s lack of content

Content is a hungry beast.  I starved it last week.  Apologies. It was really a bit of a rough week to let things get away from me and not be able to write anything because there were actually quite a few things worth delving into that happened.  Perhaps the biggest piece of news actually came […]

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. Legal ethics

Throwback Thursday on Cinco de Cuatro Eve

Usually the concept of Throwback Thursday should reach back farther than merely months ago, but I can’t resist given yesterday’s news. So, I throw you back to this February 15, 2018 post.  And I do so to point out something about which I was right and something about which I was quite wrong  but with […]

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. Legal ethics

A short post-mortem for Tennessee’s proposed RPC 8.4(g)

With the flood of comments in opposition, and particularly the fact that the Attorney General of our state felt the need to file not just one but two comments in opposition, the unsuccessful end of the effort to convince the Tennessee Supreme Court to adopt a version of RPC 8.4(g) has felt inevitable for the […]