I’ve seen a number of short pieces around the Internet about the 70-year old Missouri lawyer who has gotten himself suspended for at least six months over a number of acts of misconduct, including (the thing most prominently mentioned) using information that his client improperly obtained by guessing someone else”s password. There is no question […]
It’s a stupid and demeaning term. In both contexts, whether you replace the asterisks with the original two letters, it, or the other two letters, en. It is unfortunate that the second term was ever coined by this guy, and it is remarkable to think that this guy has included it for many years as […]
Over the last several months there have been various iterations of stories and reports making the rounds about the susceptibility of our profession to depression and substance abuse, reports of 1 in 5 lawyers being problem drinkers, etc. There are also always folks out there writing variations of pieces about the problems that are created […]
Late in 2015, the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility issued Formal Ethics Opinion 2015-F-160 addressing issues regarding retention of client files. I wrote here about a significant problem with the part of the opinion that indicated that our RPC 1.15(b) required retention of all client files for a five-year period. The problem, to me, was […]
There probably has been news this week about a set of departures of lawyers from one prominent firm to another or efforts that firms are taking to disincentivize their lawyers from taking their clients and moving on to a new destinaton. As I indicated on Monday, I’m not actually around at the moment so this […]
So, today is the one-year anniversary of my first post. Today’s entry is the 130th blogpost at Faughnan On Ethics.com, which looking back at the original concept I had in my head — having my blogposts be more concise takes on issues of interest to me, rather than the longer-form pieces I had previously done […]
I like a well written, helpful ethics opinion as much as the next guy. Probably more so, given the statistically low likelihood that anyone standing near me at a given time is also a male lawyer who commits a significant part of their practice to legal ethics and professional responsibility matters. I think I’ve also […]
Given that there isn’t a lot going on in the news that relates to legal issues, I feel obligated to offer lawyers something to read. (I don’t think I’ve ever gone on record here about how badly I wish someone would create and implement a sarcasm font upon which all users could agree. Maybe it […]
Two recent events have brought me back around to wanting to talk about ethics issues raised by this fascinating documentary. One event is public and absurd. The other event was semi-private and surprising (at least to me). As neither of the recent events are actually the thing I wanted to talk about a couple of […]
Some time ago, I wrote a bit about how existing ethics rules make attempting to use Kickstarter to launch a law firm not a viable option. The primary problem with using crowdsourcing to raise funds to start a law practice is the prohibition in the ethics rules on nonlawyer ownership or investment in law firms. […]