For my last post of 2015, some thoughts on a frequent source of trouble for lawyers in certain practice areas where efforts are often made to charge nonrefundable fees. In Tennessee, back in 2011, our rules were revised to specifically acknowledge the legitimacy of the concept of a nonrefundable fee but also to impose certain […]
Tag: RPC 1.15
Many moons ago at this point, I wrote a post here with some criticism about ABA Formal Ethics Opinion 471 and the various questions important to client file issues on which it punted. Back then I also wrote about how our effort in Tennessee to get an ethics rule adopted (it would have RPC 1.19 in […]
Lawyers need to be able to trust some people to do their jobs. These people might be support staff, colleagues, or sometimes even opposing counsel. When it comes to trust accounting though, situation after situation demonstrates that no matter how much a lawyer trusts an employee with access to or some control over trust account […]
A while back I wrote a piece about a relatively deep conversation I had about right and wrong and why lawyers do some really bad things with a SuperShuttle driver in Phoenix. If you missed it, you can read it here. But one of the things I didn’t say during that conversation was that there […]
In a lot of jurisdictions, mine included, formal ethics opinions from the governing disciplinary body are issued, if not rarely, then on a “few and far between” kind of time frame. In North Carolina, on October 23, 2015, 3 were released in one day. Two of them provide overall good advice. One of those two […]
For a change of pace, I write today about a very well constructed ethics opinion out of New York. (To keep this positivity train chugging along for at least one more day, my plan for tomorrow is to discuss a federal court decision out of Florida impacting attorney ethics that is also praiseworthy and that […]
Last week I was confronted with another example of how valuable excellent IT professionals can be for practicing lawyers. As routinely happens, our firm’s spam filter trapped a significant number of emails last Wednesday. Because legitimate email sometimes gets wrongly blocked or filtered, our IT folks also review what gets caught in the filters. Last […]
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Death and disbarment
Returning to the office from the holiday weekend, I noticed these two sad and weird stories of lawyers doing inexcusable things that seem to have common threads of death and disbarment running through them. Many years ago I wrote a humor column for young lawyers. and you can find some of those columns still floating […]