Categories
. Legal ethics

TN Adopts Revisions to Lawyer Advertising Rules

This site has not historically been a “breaking” news sort of site. Today will be an exception with very pithy editorial content. I am very happy to report that the Tennessee Supreme Court today adopted proposed revisions to the lawyer advertising rules which I have written about in the past. You can download today’s order […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Update on racial insensitivity within the practice of law.

It still exists, of course. No real surprises there. In just the last two weeks, there have been multiple stories that drive that point home. One such story, while admittedly actually involving a sitting judge rather than a practicing lawyer, is this one out of Colorado. Another such story involves a New York lawyer who […]

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. Legal ethics

Protecting lawyers and law firms from themselves.

Let’s talk about something coming out of D.C. but entirely unrelated to politics for a change. If you know, you know. And, if you know, then based on the post title you’ve guessed we are going to talk about the D.C. Bar Rules of Professional Conduct Review Committee’s draft Report on proposing changes to the […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Three short burst updates

In case you haven’t yet “checked out” for the week to have what I hope is a makeshift, stay-at-home Thanksgiving banquet to kick-off your holiday weekend, here are four very short but, mostly timely, updates on topics of prior posts. First, the Tennessee Supreme Court has put the TBA advertising rule revisions proposal out for […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Increasing access to information about legal services – TN Edition

This will be a mostly short entry for this week because the most important item to put into your reading pile is what I’m writing about rather than the post itself. (Admittedly, I’m certain many of you are thinking … “well, that’s kind of always true Einstein.”) I have written over the years here about […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

The era of permanent disbarment in TN has begun.

What now seems like an eternity ago, because it was written in the before-times, I wrote about Tennessee’s change to its disciplinary procedural rules resulting in implementation of permanent disbarment. I questioned exactly why the change was needed and what it would mean given that it was being paired with changes to extend the maximum […]

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. Legal ethics

The thing about the re-regulation of the practice of law …

. . . is it really could go either way. It could make things better or it could make things worse. It truly depends on who ends up doing the re-regulation and what motivates them along the way. What is prompting the need to say this sentiment out loud today exactly? Well, cynical types might […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Three developments presented in decreasing order of importance.

Last week, the Utah Supreme Court officially approved the most “radical” change in any state’s ethics rules since DC adopted a limited approval for law firms to have partners who are not lawyers several decades ago. The Utah Supreme Court announced its adoption of a package of reforms aimed at improving the access to justice […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Opposite ends but still the same spectrum (mostly).

Lawyers can get into significant amounts of ethical trouble over money issues. They can put their licenses at real risk by messing up their trust accounting obligations, they can get in trouble for overbilling clients, and, often, if they end up suing a client for failure to pay bills that are appropriately due, they will […]

Categories
. Legal ethics

Two for Thursday.

It is Thursday, right? In a “recent” effort, I mentioned that there were recent developments I was planning to eventually write about. Today presents an effort at checking two of them off the list that have only Tennessee in common. Neither of which likely provides fodder for a full post, so they will be covered […]