Categories
Legal ethics Off-Topic

Nothing that’s happening is normal. None. Of. it.

This next stretch of time would likely be hard enough for many folks to get through if nothing else troubling was going on in our nation. This is the stretch of time where we will be reminded time and time again of the five-year anniversary of events that changed, for many irrevocably, our lives because […]

Categories
Legal ethics

R.I.P. – NJ Advisory Ethics Opinion 745

Before launching into the substance of this post, I wanted to briefly acknowledge that tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of the existence of this blog. In the 10 years that have gone by since I put my first post into the tubes, I have written 583 more posts likely spanning at least 750,000 and perhaps […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Trump cannot ruin America without the help of lawyers

Unfortunately, it seems clear that he will have no trouble finding ones willing to do his bidding. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Can you just “nuh uh” civil rights violations?

Apparently, when you are the Tennessee Supreme Court that might just be something you are powerful enough to do. For a variety of reasons over the years, I have refrained from writing anything here about the Tennessee Lawyers Assistance Program. During the course of my career, there have been times I have been a huge […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Bullying between clients and lawyers remains a one-way street

Many years ago now, I wrote a post about a lawyer improperly making a public announcement that they were no longer representing a prominent client. On the cusp of the United States beginning a journey caused by repeating one of its gravest electoral mistakes, I will not repeat that post in its entirety. Instead, I […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Being a lawyer is testing, becoming a lawyer still shouldn’t turn on passing “a test”

Yes, I know. The gap in content around here is inexcusable. Every week or so I should at least post this gif to keep people interested. Today though we offer content. We are spurred to drop all the other projects and write because two things happened today. First, of local interest, the results for the […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Can you name all the ABA Model Rules that can never be violated?

Instinctively, if you know your way around the attorney ethics rules, I don’t think the question posed by the title of this post is a particularly hard question. But two incidents I’ve experienced within the last few weeks have caused me to question how well understood it is among the legal community that there are […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Generating more Generative AI content

It has somehow been a minute since I’ve written any updates on anything in the world of Generative AI issues. That hasn’t, of course, been because things haven’t been happening. They have. And even today I found myself as part of yet another panel presentation on the ethics issues surrounding the rise of the use […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Anti-discrimination v. anti-diversity

It has been a while since I have written anything here about ABA Model Rule 8.4(g) and efforts to adopt variations of it at the state level anywhere. Part of why that is the case is that there hasn’t (to the best of my knowledge) been many developments of note to write about. Part of […]

Categories
Legal ethics

To “Non” or not to “Non”?

Is currently sort of a question it seems. It is not the world’s most pressing question, but it is a discussion topic in the world of the practice of law getting some extensive media scrutiny in legal publications. For example, here, here, and here. For those not fully enmeshed in the topic already, the issue […]