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Legal ethics

Requiring lawyers only to disclose whether they have malpractice insurance can do more harm than good.

So, this is an issue that states continue to “struggle” with from time to time, and the latest I am aware of is Vermont. Michael Kennedy has alerted the public to a pending proposal in Vermont that is now out for public comment that would require Vermont lawyers to disclose on their annual registration statements […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Official dishonesty and the consequences for lawyers – 3 of the latest examples

A common theme in many disciplinary proceedings brought against lawyers involves dishonesty.  This should not really be a surprise given that lawyers are human beings and human beings have a tendency toward being dishonest when they can get away with it.  Although there is an ethics rule that, on its face, makes it unethical for […]

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. Legal ethics

A reminder (for you) about the importance of coverage issues and (for me) that there is a second side to most stories.

This is an update on the California lawyer who successfully compelled arbitration of a client’s salacious claims that he treated her as essentially a “sex slave” that I wrote about here. While I talked about that case as an example of the growing power of arbitration provisions in the arena of attorney-client contracts, I did […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Another wrinkle from that malpractice insurance coverage opinion

Earlier this week, I wrote about the scariness that can come with understanding another way that lawyers’ fates are tied together when they practice law in the same firm: one lawyer failing to disclose a known problem on a malpractice renewal application could lead to loss of coverage for all of the other lawyers in […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

An unsettling insurance decision if you practice in a law firm of any size.

The month of April 2015 brought a declaration from a legal consultant that he anticipates seeing a 10,000 lawyer law firm within five years.  Trying to determine if there would ever be a law firm so big that from a conflicts perspective its operation was fundamentally unworkable might be an interesting intellectual exercise to undertake, but […]