Late this Summer, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued an opinion, over a dissent, that imposed a public censure against a lawyer for what were, pretty clearly, a series of failures on the part of the lawyer’s staff in the handling of a client’s matter. What makes the case, Garland v. BPR, interesting, and worthy of that […]
Tag: Public Censure
About a week or so ago, I learned something new about South Carolina’s ethics rules – thanks to the law-student-powered blog of the University of Miami (FL) School of Law, Legal Ethics in Motion. They wrote about a South Carolina federal court case in which a motion to disqualify premised on South Carolina Rule 1.18 was […]
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Crossing the Line in Maine
No, the title is not a veiled attempt to publicly-shame Maine’s Governor for his latest act of public ridiculousness… or is it? This is instead a short post discussing conduct that I posit is a lot more common than you might think and that resulted recently in a very low-level of discipline against a Maine […]
2016 was a year marked with quite a number of unexpected (at least to me) developments. 2017 likely will have its share of unexpected events as well. To wrap up the year, I wanted to use what little platform I have to pursue something that is both driven by blatant self-interest and is in the […]
Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an important opinion on judicial recusal, Williams v. Pennsylvania. It is the first instance in which the Court has applied the standard first announced in Caperton — that recusal is required when the risk of actual bias on the part of a judge is “too high to be […]
Throwback Thursday is definitely a thing all over the World Wide Web it seems, but maybe Tech Tuesday ought to be a thing? Though, I guess, for lawyers focusing on technology has to be an every day affair. Like multitudes of others, I wrote a little bit recently about the Panama Papers and the Mossack […]
I have made reference in the past on this blog about the problems that can come from the fact that Tennessee is one of a very few states that still use the “preponderance of the evidence” standard in disciplinary proceedings against lawyers. Fewer than a dozen jurisdictions including Tennessee still use that standard. Around forty U.S. […]
Press releases on public discipline issued by the BPR can be something of an art form and sometimes, but not always, don’t tell the whole story. So setting aside any tea-leaf reading that might otherwise go into this one involving what sounds like a situation in which a lawyer was perhaps unknowingly used by clients […]
When lawyers think about problematic business transactions with a client, they usually think about things like loans or, perhaps, situations in which a lawyer is joining a client as an investor in a business venture. The ethics rule regarding business transactions with clients, RPC 1.8(a), is broader in its coverage than just those situations and, […]
A little while back, I posted about a Virginia lawyer who had been suspended after being drunk and disruptive while attending a CLE. At the time, I speculated about what the ethics infraction might have been – making a false statement in terms of filling out the paperwork on attendance. I was in the ballpark, […]