Not too long ago, I weighed in on an Alaska Ethics Opinion about the ethics of lawyers using email “bugs” that surreptitiously track what happens to an email after it has been sent. There is a new, interesting read on the “legal or not” aspect of this technology in the ABA/BNA Lawyers Manual on Professional […]
Tag: Traps for the Unwary
Sorry, bad and lazy pun for a title. As loyal readers of the site know, I like to write from time-to-time about formal ethics opinions issued by state regulatory bodies. A recent one caught my attention at first for its — “I cannot believe someone even had to ask feel.” But, ultimately after I read […]
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 […]
An important development for labor lawyers that I delved into a bit recently here has now been put on hold. I managed to point out that there would be significant efforts aimed through litigation at stopping the rule from ever going into effect. Yesterday, a Texas federal district court has stayed the Department of Labor’s new […]
Last week the Chattanooga Estate Planning Council was kind enough to have me come to speak to them about ethical issues arising from the uncertain world of the law regarding digital assets. They were gracious hosts and, to the extent there were important ethics issues to really discuss, we managed to cover that most, if […]
For my last post of 2015, some thoughts on a frequent source of trouble for lawyers in certain practice areas where efforts are often made to charge nonrefundable fees. In Tennessee, back in 2011, our rules were revised to specifically acknowledge the legitimacy of the concept of a nonrefundable fee but also to impose certain […]
I’ve previously written about a pending rule revision in Tennessee that the BPR initiated and to which the TBA responded here. Last week the Tennessee Supreme Court entered this order and adopted essentially the language that the BPR was seeking and did not incorporate the suggestions the TBA made that would have actually provided the […]
Last week I was confronted with another example of how valuable excellent IT professionals can be for practicing lawyers. As routinely happens, our firm’s spam filter trapped a significant number of emails last Wednesday. Because legitimate email sometimes gets wrongly blocked or filtered, our IT folks also review what gets caught in the filters. Last […]
Press releases on public discipline issued by the BPR can be something of an art form and sometimes, but not always, don’t tell the whole story. So setting aside any tea-leaf reading that might otherwise go into this one involving what sounds like a situation in which a lawyer was perhaps unknowingly used by clients […]