Two For Tuesday For Tennessee

From time to time I feel a real obligation to write about things that are primarily (if not exclusively) only of interest to Tennessee lawyers. Today is one of those days so apologies in advance if this is not your cup of tea. (On the upside for you, this will be relatively short so you might be able to justify still reading it.)

There have been two significant developments this week in Tennessee involving rule changes (not ethics rule changes) but rule changes important to the practice of law in Tennessee. One is the adoption of a new Tennessee Supreme Court Rule authorizing collaborative law family law practice. The other is a further structural and substantive set of changes to the rule that governs the admission of lawyers in Tennessee – Tenn. Sup. Ct. R. 7.

The revisions to Rule 7 address a number of non-substantive changes including architectural reworking of the structure and ordering of portions of the rule but also address some substantive issues as well. You can read the entirety of the order implementing the revisions (which includes both a clean and a red-lined copy of the revised Rule 7) here.

Perhaps the most important substantive change to Rule 7 is the expansion of a registration procedure (currently available to in-house counsel admitted in another U.S. jurisdiction but working in Tennessee) to foreign legal counsel employed as a lawyer by an organization as well. In connection with that development, a 180-day amnesty period for foreign legal counsel presently practicing in Tennessee is on offer (as occurred in the past with the in-house counsel provisions).

Second, while the provisions addressing the right to practice pending admission have been explicitly tweaked to make clear that someone can apply and obtain that authority whether seeking admission by comity or by sitting for the bar exam (or, now that TN has embraced the UBE, submitting a score on the UBE from another jurisdiction), the rule has also been amended to make plain that a disciplinary complaint filed against someone practicing pursuant to the practice pending admission rule is also a disciplinary complaint against the attorney who is on record as being their supervising attorney (as is also the case with qualified law students permitted to engage in limited practice in compliance with the rules.

The adoption of a new rule permitting collaborative family law practice in Tennessee has been in the works since 2017 but was finally implemented this week and takes effect immediately. You can read the entirety of new Tenn. Sup. Ct. R. 53 here.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of collaborative family law practice (and I suspect there are many of you), a review of the rule is worth your time to get a flavor for the dynamic. One of the most important pieces is the notion that lawyers engaged in this kind of representation are prohibited in almost all circumstances from engaging in any litigation proceedings on behalf of the party they are representing related to the issue for which the collaboration is focused. (Which is a bit of weird end around on what would otherwise likely be viewed as a restriction on the right to practice in violation of our RPC 5.6.) In terms of impact on lawyer ethics, the other piece of the rule that has a direct impact is the piece that provides relief from the imputation of a collaborative lawyer’s conflicts to other lawyers in their firm in instances where the representation involves a person of “low income.” Specifically:

Section 10. Exception from Disqualification for Representation of Low-Income Parties.

After a collaborative family law proceeding concludes, another lawyer in a law firm with which a collaborative lawyer disqualified under Section 9, Subsection (a), is associated may represent a party without a fee in the collaborative family law matter or a matter related to the collaborative family law matter if:

(a) the party has an annual income that qualifies the party for free legal representation under the criteria established by the law firm for free legal representation;

(b) the collaborative family law participation agreement authorizes that representation; and

(c) the collaborative lawyer is isolated from any participation in the collaborative family law matter through procedures with the law firm that are reasonably calculated to isolate the collaborative lawyer from such participation as set out in Tenn. Sup. Ct. Rule 8, RPC 1.10.