So, I am certain you have heard by now that a little under a week ago the ABA issued a new Formal Ethics Opinion to address the ethical obligations of lawyers in the aftermath of a cyber-attack or an electronic data breach. ABA Opinion 483 makes for a good read and provides good guidance about […]
Tag: Technology
So there are things that can really make you feel small. And there are things that can really lead to despair and a feeling of helplessness. Fortunately, there are few things that do both at once. The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can do both of those things pretty simply. If you […]
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Neither a stalker nor a burglar be.
Matters of the heart have caused people lots of problems throughout the course of human history. Matters of the heart, when the heart is located inside the chest of a lawyer, work pretty much the same way. Of course, sometimes stories that, on the surface, seem like matters of the heart might be more fairly […]
There has been something of a trend of late in terms of ethics opinions focusing on variations on the breadth of the duty of client confidentiality and the inconvenience it creates for lawyers who have bought in to the modern trend of sharing and oversharing when online. There was this opinion from the ABA and […]
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Information overload; summer struggles.
Mid-August often feels like summer doldrums. Yet, there has been so much recent information of interest in the world of legal ethics that it is hard to keep up. Thus, one can manage to feel simultaneously adrift and overloaded. In that spirit (and because I am that “one”), here are a handful (plus 2) of […]
Blackhawks or Devils? Bulls or Nets? Barack Obama or Chris Christie? Northwestern or Rutgers? Kanye or Wu-Tang Clan? Wilco or Bruce Springsteen? Some of those are easy calls; some are harder decisions to make. What they all have in common though is that one comes out of Illinois and the other comes out of New […]
Today’s title refers to two developments worth writing about that caught my attention in the last little bit that only have the issue of social media in common. I will try to let the reader decided which is which (or if both are both) in due course. The first development is an example of a lawyer […]
Lawyers billing clients on the basis of time spent is less than ideal for all involved. For lawyers, it isn’t the best proxy for value delivered in terms of service and incentivizes inefficiency. For clients, it isn’t the best proxy of value received in terms of service and leaves clients feeling like the only way […]
Prominent technology blogger, Robert Ambrogi, has taken to Above the Law to criticize the latest ABA Formal Ethics Opinion. In addition to attempting to savage it over being somehow untimely since lawyers have been blogging for almost 20 years, his primary substantive criticism of the opinion is that it makes no sense for an ethics rule […]
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Another good opinion from the ABA SCEPR
This was not what I originally planned to write about today, but … here we are all the same. Today, the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility released a new opinion and, because it relates to social media, it is generating a good deal of discussion online. It is being rolled out and […]