Categories
. Legal ethics

Brooding about ethics.

So, it’s been a minute or so since my last content. You’ve probably moved on and found a new favorite ethics blog. It’s probably Michael Kennedy’s actually, he’s been relentless with content in March 2021. You might be wondering what has happened to keep me from writing over these last 20 or so days. First, […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

What decade is it again?

So, the experience of the last year of pandemic life has messed with a lot of people’s ability to remember when certain things happened. For some people, remembering events of the last year are not the problem as much as remembering when certain things happened in the before times. For others, short term memory of […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

“Here’s a new post.” (cleaned up)

I have tried for the better part of a week to convince myself that I needed to write something about the most recent ABA Formal Ethics Opinion which was released in February 2021 and which attempts to explain what “materially adverse” means in the context of ABA Model Rule 1.9 (and Model Rule 1.18). I […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Lawyers and publicity. Two related but unrelated stories.

This space has focused on a number of occasions on the difficulties for lawyers in dealing with certain forms of negative publicity. I won’t link to all of those past stories for a variety of reasons. (If you are stuck at home both because of the pandemic and winter weather and are looking for things […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

ABA SCEPR Increases Lifetime Batting Average.

Look at me with the super seasonally timely sports reference. Baseball. In January. I have written on quite a few occasions in the past about the perils for lawyers in responding to criticism posted about them online. Well, the ABA has issued its latest ethics opinion to address the same topic. Behold ABA Formal Ethics […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Protecting lawyers and law firms from themselves.

Let’s talk about something coming out of D.C. but entirely unrelated to politics for a change. If you know, you know. And, if you know, then based on the post title you’ve guessed we are going to talk about the D.C. Bar Rules of Professional Conduct Review Committee’s draft Report on proposing changes to the […]

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. Legal ethics

An open letter to State Bar of Texas

Dear Sir or Ma’am: It’s been a tough year, but I hope this email finds you staying safe. I’m writing to urge you to give some real thought to whether your rule on the ability to impose an “interim” suspension on a Texas lawyer goes as far as it needs to in order to be […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Following up after shouting into a void.

This is not really a “new content” post. With luck, I will have one of those later this week. This, however, is a follow up about something from last month. It is the best sort of follow up because it is prompted by the process of sifting back through the past year to prepare for […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Three short burst updates

In case you haven’t yet “checked out” for the week to have what I hope is a makeshift, stay-at-home Thanksgiving banquet to kick-off your holiday weekend, here are four very short but, mostly timely, updates on topics of prior posts. First, the Tennessee Supreme Court has put the TBA advertising rule revisions proposal out for […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Increasing access to information about legal services – TN Edition

This will be a mostly short entry for this week because the most important item to put into your reading pile is what I’m writing about rather than the post itself. (Admittedly, I’m certain many of you are thinking … “well, that’s kind of always true Einstein.”) I have written over the years here about […]