Professional Responsibility Blog

 Back in November of 2019 I reported that Georgia became the 38th state to adopt the Model Rules proposition that the duty of competence mus...

 A few days ago I reported that the era of non-lawyer owned firms is here, now that Arizona and Utah have approved some version of such an ...

February 14, 2021   (updates at the end) Last week, the ABA’s Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility issued a new Form...

March 13, 2021 The ABA Journal is reporting that a Florida lawyer is facing an ethics complaint for describing himself as a pit bull lawyer...

 March 16, 2021  (update, below) Back in December, a federal district court declared unconstitutional Pennsylvania's version of ABA Mod...

 As I am sure you know by now, Utah and Arizona recently became the first two states to make changes to their regulatory structure of the pr...

Many lawyers and recent law school graduates believe they would benefit from mental health or substance abuse treatment but do not seek help...

Earlier this week in a case called Karton v. Ari Design & Construction, Inc ., the California Court of Appeal decided that a court can d...

Benjamin Cardozo is better known to my students as the New York Court of Appeals judge who wrote Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad , which de...

NPR has a long story that reminded me of the "hot potato doctrine."  In case you don't remember, this is the doctrine that say...

 The ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility has been busy issuing formal ethics opinions recently.  Formal Opinion...

 Wisconsin Advisory Opinion offers cybersecurity tips on working remotely.  Ethical Grounds has the full story here .

Late last year, the New Jersey state supreme court held that law firms that want to include mandatory arbitration provisions in their client...

 About a week ago, the Pennsylvania Bar Association and the Philadelphia Bar Association issued a joint ethics opinion on whether a lawyer ...

Here is a little piece of advice: don’t ask your paralegal to lie for you, particularly to cover your mistakes.   Common sense, right? Appar...

About a month ago I read a short article about two things happening in California related to the appearance of bias in the state's disc...

 Here is a link to a short article on how disciplinary agencies are likely to handle complaints about lawyers who supported Trump or repres...

 Long time readers of this blog might remember that I have been following the many lawsuits filed around the country alleging that mandatory...

Law & Crime is reporting that a Washington DC lawyer has filed complaints before the District of Columbia Court of Appeals Office of Di...

Ten days ago, a judge in Missouri found that the state’s practice of putting poor criminal defendants on a waiting list to be appointed a pu...

NPR is reporting that "[n]ewly disclosed documents from inside the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan capture a sense of panic and...

February 7, 2021 Law & Crime is reporting that a lawyer who joined Sidney Powell‘s so-called “Kraken” lawsuit in Michigan is now attempt...

Yesterday I posted a link to a review of the briefs filed in Trump's upcoming impeachment trial.  See here .  Today, the New York Times ...

Over at Verdict, Professor Dean Falvy (University of Washington School of Law) has published a very detailed review of the briefs filed by b...

Need I say more?   This actually happened.  Here is the story:  Above the Law and  Law & Crime  have more details.

 Back in September of 2020 I posted a few comments and links on the recent regulatory changes in Arizona and Utah which opened the possibili...

As I am sure you know by now, the five lawyers who had originally agreed to represent Trump in his upcoming impeachment trial quit over the ...

Trump has announced a new team of two attorneys who will represent him in the impeachment trial after his original team quit on him over the...

 Last week the Freedman Institute of Legal Ethics (at Hofstra Law School) hosted an excellent panel discussion (on Zoom) on whether it is a ...

February 1, 2021 As you know, the "Kraken team" of lawyers for the Trump campaign is facing possible procedural sanctions in a cas...

The different Trump teams of lawyers are the gift that keeps on giving.   In yet another interesting twist, in response to a motion asking f...

 January 30, 2021 Just days before his impeachment trial is set to begin, Donald Trump's entire new legal team has withdrawn from his re...

 Long time readers of this blog know that I often complain that judges do not do enough to sanction attorneys who misbehave during the proce...

January 25, 2021  (updated, at the end) A Texas lawyer who was fired from his in-house counsel job after it was determined that he recorded ...

The Tennessee Supreme Court has suspended a Nashville attorney after discovering that he posted advice on Facebook about how to make deadly ...

 A few days ago I reported that the New York State Bar Association was considering expelling Rudy Giuliani from its membership.  See here . ...

January 18, 2021 With the increasing use of websites to contact lawyers and to provide feedback about their work, lawyers need guidance on h...

The Florida Bar’s Henry Latimore Center for Professionalism  has published a document on Best Practices for Professional Electronic Communic...

Original post: 12/6/20 The ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility announced today a new formal ethics opinion on i...

 You can't make this stuff up.  The Washington Post has the story here .  Also see  Above the Law  and Yahoo news . And, there is a bit ...

A Delaware Superior Court judge ruled Monday that attorney L. Lin Wood, who filed a number of complaints challenging the results of the elec...

When Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley supported the effort to object to the electoral college, Yale and Harvard alums started internet petitions to...

 The New York State Bar Association is launching an inquiry into expelling Rudy Giuliani from its membership over his comments ahead of the ...

 About a month ago I reported that a Federal Court in Pennsylvania declared the state's recently adopted version of Model Rule 8.4(g) un...

A lot has been written and said in the past few weeks about the incompetence and improper conduct of lawyers working for Trump, but none of ...

 Discipline for prosecutorial misconduct is relatively rare which is why I am reporting on this story , which you can find in the Legal Prof...

 The Arizona Supreme Court’s two-year-old Attorney Ethics Advisory Committee has issued its first four ethics opinions. They deal with signi...

We have seen stories like this before but it is notable that the discipline imposed is for an attempt to violate the rules of professional ...

Some of you might remember an incident caught on video about two years ago in which a lawyer went on an offensive/racist tirade at a restaur...

The New Jersey Supreme Court in Delaney v. Sills  has validated the use of retainer agreements that provide that all disputes between attorn...

Attorney Lin Wood, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, has filed a lawsuit challenging the election results in Georgia in which he asserts that...

Long time readers of this blog know that I have posted many stories about Model Rule 8.4(g) since way back when it was first proposed.  Go h...

 Over at Ethical Grounds, Michael Kennedy reminds us of the proper way to withdraw from representation without violating the duty of confide...

Long time readers of this blog know that I have posted many stories on prosecutorial misconduct and, within that broad topic, on the issue o...

Unless you have been hiding somewhere with no access to the news, you know that there has been a lot of press recently on Trump's legal ...

 Back in July I reported that the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility published a new opinion in which it tried...

 More than 5,300 lawyers participated in the Gender Survey 2020 by the New York State Judicial Committee on Women in the Courts. The survey ...

Above the Law has a short summary of the situation here .  In a nutshell, some states will admit graduates without having to take the bar ex...

As you know, when a plaintiff sues a lawyer for malpractice in a litigation matter alleging that the defendant's representation caused t...