Categories
Legal ethics

Bad Ethics Opinion or the Worst Ethics Opinion? Massachusetts edition

Let’s play a blogpost game we haven’t played in a long time. (Yeah, I know, you’re saying to yourself … well that could be anything since you took all of March 2024 off buddy. A month or so seems long, but it’s actually been almost 7 years since I whipped out the “bad or worst” […]

Categories
Legal ethics

You have to unring a bell the right way & you really can only do it once.

Welcome to 2024 y’all. Lawyers spend an inordinate (but not actually unduly excessive) amount of time worried about making mistakes that involve sending the wrong information to the wrong people. For lawyers in most U.S. jurisdictions, the ethics rules do not provide truly comprehensive guidance about how to fix such a mistake because the ethics […]

Categories
Legal ethics

One bad apple spoils bunch? Ethics opinion edition

I’m sure you are familiar with the idiom “One bad apple spoils the bunch” or in some parts of the country “one bad apple spoils the barrel,” but probably not in the context of legal ethics opinions. Someone could (or has) already written versions of posts applying that idiom to lawyers generally and perhaps unethical […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Let’s talk about the 3.3 of 303 Creative

So, for folks of my political persuasion, the last week of the Supreme Court term was a real gut punch. Today’s post is not about arguing with anyone over whether the outcome of the 303 Creative decision was or was not correct and is not even about whether the Plaintiff in 303 Creative should have […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Two proposed TN Ethics Opinions – Part 2

Like a movie sequel coming out 10 years later, here comes part two of that promised two-part post. (Can you even really call something a two-part post if the second part doesn’t come along until 10 days later?) The second draft Formal Ethics Opinion put out for public comment by the Board of Professional Responsibility […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Is North Carolina’s path the future of RPC 1.6?

Okay, so in the interest of full transparency, what I really wanted to write about is the fact that we have a new entrant in the running for “Who is the worst of the Trump lawyers out there?” competition. Among the many things that have come out of the work of the January 6 Committee […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Confidentiality and credit cards

I have written here in the past about a number of ways that a lawyer’s obligation of confidentiality imposes limits on their ability to do certain things that others can do and even as to subject matter where it seems highly unfair. Most frequently, this issue arises when talking with lawyers about what they can […]

Categories
Legal ethics

Another ethics opinion that wouldn’t be required if all lawyers were good (or at least chaotic-neutral) lawyers.

There has been A LOT of stuff going on this week in the world of legal ethics. I will refrain from dedicating an entire post to try to tie this plea I made in a post back in December 2020 to these two developments, here and here. Instead, I want to talk a little bit […]

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Legal ethics

“It’s Groundhog Day… again.”

This past week included one of our nation’s most heralded fake holidays. Groundhog’s Day. Silly occasion, but still a really good movie, of course. But, playing off of the theme of repeating events and disappointing outcomes, we return to the oft-discussed topic of lawyers trying to respond to online criticism. We’ve covered in the past […]

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. Legal ethics

10 Things I Thought I Would Write About This July, But Didn’t.

So, anyone I might have hooked into caring about this site in May and June 2021 likely stopped checking for July content 1 or 2 weeks ago. Longer-term, repeatedly neglected, readers are likely still hanging in there (and forever earning my esteem). There have been a bunch of times that I thought I was going […]