I’ve written in the past about issues associated with RPC 8.4(c) and how its potential application to any act of dishonesty on the part of a lawyer — no matter how trivial or unrelated to the practice of law it might be — makes it a problematic ethics rule. A disciplinary proceeding presently being pursued […]
Tag: RPC 4.4
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 […]
I’ve mentioned in the past the fact that Tennessee has a version of RPC 4.4(b) that directly addresses, and provides what I happen to think is the correct outcome, for what a lawyer is supposed to do about the receipt of someone else’s confidential information either inadvertently or via someone who isn’t authorized to have […]
If you spend any time on social media these days, you may have noticed how irritable folks are. There are lots of reasons for it, of course. We live in stressful times. Practicing law has always been a high-stress endeavor as far as professions go; thus, cries for more civility in the practice of law […]
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 […]
I’m fortunate enough this week to be in Austin, Texas in order to share a stage with the wonderfully-talented Lynda Shely on Friday to talk for an hour on ethics at the DRI Employment and Labor Law seminar. Working off of a hypothetical that has a “cribbed” from the headlines if not a “ripped” from […]
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Speaking of bad facts making bad law…
I’ve seen a number of short pieces around the Internet about the 70-year old Missouri lawyer who has gotten himself suspended for at least six months over a number of acts of misconduct, including (the thing most prominently mentioned) using information that his client improperly obtained by guessing someone else”s password. There is no question […]
Three recent cases involving lawyers alleged to have been sleeping during trial (actually only two about sleeping lawyers, one about a lawyer pretending to sleep) leave me feeling like there has to be the germ of a worthwhile point to be made in there somewhere, but after drafting and redrafting this post in spare moments […]
So far this month, the Professional Ethics Committee for the State Bar of Texas has put out two ethics opinions worthy of some discussion given the issues tackled and the outcomes of each opinion. The more recent of the two, Opinion No. 653, evaluates whether a lawyer acting pro se in a matter has to […]
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A Rorschach test in two parts
To pass the time during Snowmageddon (Snowpocalypse?), here’s a blogpost equivalent of an ink blot test. Do you think either of these situations (or both) (or neither) involve situations where disciplinary authorities should be allocating resources to go after lawyers under the ethics rules? The first inkblot: An attorney runs advertisements for his bankrutpcy practice […]