Categories
. Legal ethics

Yet another decision coming out of Washington that complicates life.

Nope.  This too is not a post having anything to do with the recent election.  The Washington in the title is the State of Washington, and the decision is the controversial 5-4 decision issued by the Washington Supreme Court in Newman v. Highland Sch. Dist. back on October 20, 2016.  The Washington court, over a strenuous […]

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. Legal ethics

Another for the annals of ethics opinions of questionable origin

I want to quickly discuss an ethics opinion out of New York state.  No, not that one.  I’m not going to delve into the brouhaha over the one from March 2016 that only got publicity in August 2016 that involves saying it is ethical for a firm to charge clients for work performed by unpaid […]

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. Legal ethics

Proposal to adopt Ethics 20/20 Revisions in Tennessee Put Out For Public Comment

Back in August 2012, the ABA House of Delegates approved revisions to the ABA Model Rules proposed by the ABA Ethics 20/20 Commission.  Very few of the proposed revisions included in the ABA Ethics 20/20 package are earth-shaking revisions, as many of them only involve change to language in the Comment accompanying certain rules. The […]

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. Legal ethics

ABA Formal Opinion 16-474: half (or more) of a pretty good opinion

Last week, the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility issued its latest formal opinion – Opinion No. 16-474 addressing the topic of “referral” fees under the ABA Model Rules and, specifically, the intersection of Model Rule 1.5(e) and conflicts requirements under Model Rule 1.7.   Along the way, the opinion also stakes out […]

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. Legal ethics

ABA Law Connect post-mortem. ♫ Five. Five dollar. Five dollar not long. ♫

This is going to be a short update offered on a Friday for any weekend reading needs you may be facing. A bit back (on Back to the Future day actually) I mentioned (almost as only an aside) the pilot project that the ABA was launching in cooperation with Rocket Lawyer to offer a limited-scope […]

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. Legal ethics

I’ll never understand why athletes hire non-lawyer agents.

Thanks to ESPN I’ve long known more about Johnny Manziel than I care to.  But, this past week, I learned something I really should never know — why his agent decided to fire Manziel as his client.  Up until this past week, Erik Burkhardt was Manziel’s agent.  Burkhardt is a law school graduate, but from […]

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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 […]

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. Legal ethics

“Damn near never…”

I mentioned back near the end of July 2015 that I would be participating on a panel at the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers’ Annual Meeting in Chicago.  It is always an honor to get to speak at an APRL meeting, and it was particularly an honor to share the stage with Eliza Rodrigues of […]

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. Legal ethics

Traps for the Unwary – RPC 2.2: Lawyer as Intermediary

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 […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

TN Supreme Court rejects proposed resolution of disciplinary case as too lenient

This week sees a rare instance of media publicity regarding something perceived to itself be a rare event (but for which it is difficult to prove that the perception is also reality) – the rejection of a negotiated conditional guilty plea in a lawyer discipline case that had been approved by a hearing panel, and […]