So, for a variety of reasons, I’ve stewed over whether to write anything about what (before yesterday) was the most recent ABA Formal Ethics Opinion to be issued. That opinion was ABA Formal Op. 505 and presents itself as an opinion on, among other things, whether the ABA Model Rules permit the charging of any […]
Being a lawyer is hard. It is certainly not the hardest thing in the world to be, but it is hard. Lawyers have lots of obligations and lots of stress. Again, there are many who have things worse, of course. Among those “lots of obligations” are obligations to supervise those who work for them that […]
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 […]
Late this Summer, the Tennessee Supreme Court issued an opinion, over a dissent, that imposed a public censure against a lawyer for what were, pretty clearly, a series of failures on the part of the lawyer’s staff in the handling of a client’s matter. What makes the case, Garland v. BPR, interesting, and worthy of that […]
I’ve written a couple of times in the past about the status of the Tennessee Bar Association’s petition seeking to have the Tennessee Supreme Court adopt essentially all of the ABA Ethics 20/20 changes. Yesterday, the Tennessee Supreme Court entered an order doing just that – effective immediately — which now adds Tennessee to the […]
It has been a while since I last wrote about this topic. And, getting around to finally writing this piece has been so frustrating and depressing for reasons that ought to be clear by the end of this post, that I am confident that I have no plans to return to it. When I last […]
Two recent events have brought me back around to wanting to talk about ethics issues raised by this fascinating documentary. One event is public and absurd. The other event was semi-private and surprising (at least to me). As neither of the recent events are actually the thing I wanted to talk about a couple of […]
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 […]
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 […]
One likely future facing the practice of law in the U.S. is now on display in the State of Washington and getting some high-profile publicity this week. This article in The Washington Post tells you almost all you need to know about the introduction of Limited License Legal Technicians (or “nurse practitioners of the legal world” […]