“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 […]
This will be the first of several more in-depth entries focused on the Board of Law Examiners’ petition seeking some changes to Tenn. Sup. Ct. R. 7, which deals with a collection of licensing issues in Tennessee. (This will also be one of those less frequent posts where I may not adhere strictly to my […]
To clarify about that forthcoming revision to the comment to RPC 3.5(c) w/r/t restrictions on communicating with discharged jurors after trial: it impacts only the ability of trial court’s to enter routine orders — such as standing orders or local rule provision — that would place jurors off-limits from lawyers after discharge. It will not […]
After putting proposals out for public comment in 2014, the Tennessee Supreme Court in the span of a week in February 2015 ordered changes to Tennessee’s lawyer ethics rules that will each take effect on May 1, 2015. For those lawyers who favor a robust view of lawyer speech rights, the two orders present a […]