It is almost three months old now, but I wanted to right a word or two about a really well-constructed ethics opinion issued in Colorado, not just because it is an opinion that deserves to be read, but also because it raises a not-quite-academic question about the phenomenon of captive law firms. The opinion put […]
Tag: RPC 5.4
I’ve written about this topic several times (some might say probably too many times) now, but here is the first example of people who — unlike me — actually matter reaching a very familiar sounding set of conclusions about something that quite obviously is the Avvo Legal Services program. South Carolina put out an advisory […]
I’ve written previously about the maelstrom of issues presented by Avvo’s expansion from its original core business as a lawyer rating service into new things such as Avvo Legal Services — an arrangement where it makes clients, who will have already paid Avvo for the legal services they want, available directly to lawyers to perform […]
Two weeks ago, I offered some thoughts on the latest flare-up in the long-running off-and-on ABA exploration of the third-rail of the practice of law: potential non-lawyer ownership/investment in law firms. This time around, before I could even manage to finish reading all of the comments and try to write some thoughts about the comments, […]
April 2016 has brought another iteration of a seemingly, endless, (yet kind of potentially pointless unless you think the politics of the situation will somehow play out differently from the past) debate: whether some entity within the ABA is attempting to usher into reality a world in which people other than lawyers will be allowed […]
There is a lot of activity that can take place at the intersection of the lawyer ethics rules and public policy. There can be issues that aren’t addressed by lawyer ethics rules (or at least not fully addressed) but that are addressed as a matter of state public policy. What there really can’t be though […]
It was about two years ago when a man from Ohio put up a Kickstarter to raise $10 to make potato salad and ended up receiving tens of thousands of dollars in donations. I’m sure there were many people who were familiar with this concept before then, but for me that was the first I’d […]
A major issue that has dogged the legal profession in the past, and looks likely to dog it again in the near future (if you don’t happen to think it already does), is the debate over the restriction imposed under the ethics rules that prevents non-lawyers from having any ownership stake in a law firm. […]
This news out of Washington state is an unfortunate development if you had hopes that the concept of Limited License Legal Technicians (LLTs) might be a more broadly adopted cure for the “justice gap” that ails the profession in many parts of the country. Washington state’s decision to permit lawyers to share attorney fees with […]