When I was at the ARDC, I used to answer phone calls to the Ethics Inquiry hotline. All attorneys there did so for one day a week. One never knew what one was going to get – the calls came in randomly, and they were supposed to be a) anonymous and b) posed as hypotheticals. […]
As the ABA Journal recently reported, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently promulgated new rules (effective March 1) that are aimed at lawyers’ provision of investment advice to clients. I’ve been concerned about lawyers’ conduct in this arena since my involvement, early in my ARDC career, in a case involving a lawyer selling unregistered securities to […]
This post will cover a practical tip for responding to letters from the ARDC asking for information about a complainant’s initial request for an investigation. Such letters are facts of life (about 6,000 of which arise per year). It’s a lawyer’s duty to respond to such a letter, of course, and to take the matter […]
The District Court for the Northern District of California recently implemented new Guidelines for Professional Conduct. Regular practitioners there, or even occasional ones, will need to become familiar with the guidelines, and must recognize that their conduct in that district can be judged with the guidelines in mind. But it’s instructive for anyone to examine […]
(Pieter Brueghel, The Village Lawyer, 1625) (or, The World Before Spreadsheets) I’ve been very, very, very, like glacially, slow-blogging a post about lawyers’ ethical duty of competency as it ties in to the ever-expanding capabilities and complexities of tech. Andrew Perlman’s excellent summary of ethical considerations on this issue was recently published in The Professional […]
This poignant reflection on the well-known Stephen Glass saga is revealing in many ways for our profession, especially for those of us in the professionalism field. One can always see narratives of transgression and redemption play out in this line of work, but it tends to be harder to gauge or guess how those narratives […]
A few thoughts on this public reprimand of a lawyer by a federal court for distributing a communication containing otherwise-private positive comments about the lawyer from a federal judge. This will not be one of those “WHAT was the lawyer THINKING?!?” attorney discipline posts. I want to stay away from that kind of commentary as […]
Not to obsess over this one case, but LPB updated its post on the Green matter with new information: the D.C. Bar filed additional charges against Green on September 25, 2013, but those charges were not reviewed and approved until October 2014. Is this the game-changer LPB thinks it is? Does it prove that the […]
Lawyers sometimes make mistakes. They may violate rules of professional conduct. Does public protection always require the imposition of the heaviest sanctions – those that require showings of fitness to return to practice? The Legal Profession Blog recently asserted as much, but the case discussed doesn’t support such a hard-line approach. LPB describes the District of […]
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