A case written up by Mike Frisch earlier this month caught my eye because it involves a discussion of two still-evolving areas of claims that can get made against law firms. Most of the case, and most of what Frisch focuses on, is the malpractice claim that was made regarding an alleged lost opportunity to […]
Tag: RPC 1.16
This is a question I’ve asked in the past. It is not instinctively an easy question to wrestle with. It can easily boil over into various slippery-slope arguments and accusations regarding risk of inviting concepts of the “thought police” and the like. But another news item invites the question back into the arena for further discussion. This ABA […]
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 […]
There are always a variety of ways that examples of overreaching by attorneys on fees manage to push into the legal news. Recently, I wrote about one example involving hourly billing. More often than not, overreaching under that system is what makes the news. It is not the only way that attorneys overreach on fees […]
The pun was, of course, inevitable. It was also fully intended. In fact, it is, at least for me, repetitive as back in 2013 I was asked to do a seminar on the ethics of being a notary public — they have their own ethics code — and I called it “Notary-ly Common Topic: The […]
It is still astounding (as well as deeply dispiriting) that the context of the discussion I’m about to launch is the work of White House Counsel but this is the world we currently occupy. You may very well have read this fascinating The Washington Post article by now released in connection with the ongoing news story […]
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It’s been a while.
Today I’m going to splice together two short discussions about topics that I haven’t mentioned in a while. (And, for any fans of the podcast U Talking U2 to Me that are out there, you do have to read the title of this post to sound like the first words of this remake right here.) […]
I have written a few times about the ABA’s adoption of a new Model Rule 8.4(g). One point that was brought up in the run-up to that rule actually finally being adopted was that some more than 20 jurisdictions already had an anti-discrimination rule in place in the black letter of their rules in one […]
The need for clarity with respect to what makes up the “client file” has been an issue I have tried to stay up to date on dating back to our unsuccessful efforts back in 2009 to convince the Tennessee Supreme Court to adopt a rule – what would have been RPC 1.19 — to address […]
So, this week the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility issued Formal Op. 476 addressing the need to protect client confidentiality when a lawyer seeks to withdraw for reasons involving the client’s failure to pay. As explained below, it is a solid, practical opinion touching on a subject often overlooked by lawyers who […]