Yesterday, I offered a positive review of a recent ethics opinion from the New York City Bar. Today, I want to talk through this Order on the Merits striking down Florida’s restriction in its ethics rules on the ability of lawyers to refer to themselves as a specialist in the absence of a board certification from […]
Tag: Rule Revisions
When people talk about the future of legal ethics in the United States, it is always helpful to engage them in a dialogue about what purpose they think the regulation of lawyers is meant to serve. If you and the other person do not agree on what the purposes to be served are supposed to […]
In Tennessee, we have a version of RPC 1.6(b)(4) patterned after the ABA Model Rule that permits a lawyer to disclose confidential client information for the purpose of getting advice about how to comply with his/her ethical obligations. The last sentence of Comment [9] to that rule stresses that this disclosure can only be made, however, if […]
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“Does this require a response?”
“Does this require a response?” Print those words out and tape them to the top of your monitor or laptop screen. They are words to live by. Practicing law is stressful and always has been. Lawyers have always known that they can make mistakes that destroy their client’s life or financial situation and potentially their […]
My paternal grandfather succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease. As someone who makes a living (such as it is) using his mind (and is pretty certain that he could not feed his family if forced to use his hands for a living), the loss of my mental faculties is one of my greatest fears. In that regard, […]
Over the last few months, I have posted on several occasions about the petition pending before the Tennessee Supreme Court seeking some significant changes to the rules in Tennessee regarding admission of attorneys to practice in a variety of contexts. If you are new to the blog, you can get up to speed on this […]
On March 31, the Tennessee Supreme Court prudently decided not to turn Tennessee’s mechanism for lawyers to provide information about how much pro bono they perform each year into a mandatory obligation. Mandatory reporting could have placed lawyers at risk of the administrative suspension of their license for being unwilling to provide such information. […]
In my first post on the heels of the filing of the pending BLE petition earlier this month, I made reference to Tennessee’s attorney licensing system being broken. The primary problem is that language in Rule 7 makes obtaining licensing by comity (i.e. waiving in without having to take TN’s bar examination) a practical impossibility. Currently, […]
UPDATED TO ADD LINK The Tennessee Supreme Court has put out an order today soliciting public comments on that BLE petition proposing changes to Rule 7 and a few other rules. Deadline for submission of public comments is July 31, 2015. I’ve already written about some aspects of the petition on a number of occasions […]
No, not in any of the ways that would be fodder for jokes or insults directed at lawyers. This is actually another follow-up post of thoughts on an aspect of the BLE’s petition for changes to Rule 7 that I first discussed here. And despite the “click-bait” nature of the title of the post, there […]