The Law for Lawyers Today blog is reporting on a recent case applying the "hot potato doctrine" in Mississippi. You can read the story here. The case does not seem to add much to what we already know about the doctrine other than the fact that the case did not quite involve the typical scenario in which the doctrine applies.
Typically the hot potato doctrine applies when a lawyer drops a current client in order to take on a new client. In the Mississippi case, the lawyer took on the new client and then dropped the current client. Thus, in this case what the lawyer did was enter into a concurrent conflict for a short period of time and then tried to resolve it by dropping one of the two concurrent clients. In other words, the doctrine is usually applied when a lawyer drops a client in order to avoid entering into a conflict, while here the lawyer dropped a client in order to remedy a conflict he was in already.
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