Professional Responsibility Blog

 Attorney John Eastman fought to overturn the 2020 presidential election and keep Donald Trump in power. Now, he's fighting to keep his ...

Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007 who helped prepare Justices Roberts and Alito for their confirmation ...

 Here is a short article on (and called) "Ethical Considerations for Lawyers Regarding Email Encryption".  You can read it here o...

 If you follow the news about Professional Responsibility you know that for years there has been a lot of debate about whether it is a good ...

So, here is the second installment of the day in the "how not to practice law category" and again, as usual, the punchline says it...

 It has been a while since I last posted a story in our running category of "how not to practice law" in which, as the name sugges...

 A few days ago I posted some links on lawyering and the use of artificial intelligence - a topic that seems to dominate the professional re...

As you know, and we have discussed in this blog many times, a number of states have programs that recognize "non-lawyer" legal pro...

 The ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility has issued a Formal Ethics Opinion (No. 506) on a lawyer's respons...

As I reported earlier this week, there has been a lot of discussion about AI and the practice of law this year.  See here for my blog posts...

June 1, 2023 The Professional Responsibility blogsphere was dominated this week by a discussion of a New York Times story called “Here’s Wh...

 Here is a link to a recently published short analysis of ethical rules regarding remote work.

 Multidistrict litigation, or MDL, now dominates federal dockets, impacting hundreds of thousands  of plaintiffs and routinely grappling wit...

I have written about the notion of " wellness " before, including about a report on the negative effects of the practice of law a...

Way back in 2016 the Board of Professional Conduct of the Ohio Supreme Court released an advisory ethics opinion on whether a lawyer may ent...

The Arizona Supreme Court recently ordered Former Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawyers to pay $2,000 in sanctions ...

Back in January I reported ( here ) that Idaho rejected a proposal to adopt Model Rule 8.4(g).  A few days ago, the Louisiana Legal Ethics B...

 In a recent post, Michael Kennedy (Ethical Grounds) reviews issues related to lawyers leaving firms.  If you need a quick reminder of some ...

Poor defendants in Mississippi are routinely jailed for months, and sometimes even years, without being appointed an attorney due to the sta...

April 9, 2023 Last month, the Colorado Supreme Court adopted new rules to create a program to license legal paraprofessionals to perform cer...

Could attorney Robert Costello have to face ethics questions for testimony on Michael Cohen?  Professor Steven Lubet (Northwestern) thinks s...

Last year, a Federal District Court judge found that New York’s unauthorized practice of law statute violated the First Amendment’s protecti...

As you probably know by now, a federal judge recently ruled that one of Donald Trump's former lawyers must testify about communications ...

Last week we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the decision in Gideon v. Wainwright , which recognized that defendants accused of serious c...

The Legal Profession Bog is reporting that Rudy Giuliani recently filed a post-hearing brief in the District of Columbia bar discipline case...

 The other day I saw a story with the title: " Trump lawyer's ethics issue: He initially was approached by Daniels ."  In it, ...

Most states have adopted the view that the duty of competence includes a duty to keep up with modern technology.  Also, most states have ado...

 Last week I reported that the "world's first robot lawyer" was getting sued...  sort of...  It would be funny if the robot la...

 There has been a lot of discussion about artificial intelligence recently and I am sure there will be many articles soon on different ways ...

 This week saw a lot of coverage and debate about the decision by the Colorado disciplinary authorities to agree to a stipulated public cens...

As reported in Courthouse News Service, "[t]he world’s first robot lawyer has been practicing law without a license — doing a pretty po...

There has been a lot of attention lately to issues related to Artificial Intelligence ("AI"), particularly to the use of ChatGPT t...

The Illinois Supreme Court recently announced amendments to Illinois Rules of Professional Conduct 1.5 and 1.15 to clarify the law related t...

Ipse Dixit has posted a podcast with Elise Bernlohr Maizel, Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering at NYU Law School, in which she discusse...

The Arizona Senate recently approved a bill that "prohibits the Supreme Court from requiring an attorney to be a member of any organiza...

The ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility has issued a new Formal Ethics Opinion (no. 504) on the issue of choice...

If you have been following the story of DoNotPay -- the company that claimed to offer a "bot" lawyer, but which after some bad pub...

February 27, 2023 Several Professional Responsibility lawyers and scholars recently published a proposal to renew the American system of law...

I recently reported that Donald Trump and his lawyers were fined to the tune of almost a million dollars in one of the many frivolous cases ...

 It is difficult to keep up with all the different legal actions that Trump is in the middle of these days.  A few days ago I reported on an...

The special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents is seeking to compel a lawyer for the former president to ...

I have been following the story of DoNotPay, a company that at one point offered a million dollars to anyone who’d let its chatbot argue a c...

 A few days ago I posted a story on a company called DoNotPay which at one point offered a million dollars to anyone who’d let its chatbot a...

There has been a lot of attention paid to artificial intelligence in the practice of law recently.  One of the main sources of debate has be...

 Most states now adhere to the notion that the duty of competence includes an element of competence over the use of technology.  But there a...

The Legal Profession Blog is reporting that the District of Columbia Disciplinary Counsel just filed a 46-page Proposed Findings of Fact an...

 A few days ago I reported that the California Bar has filed a disciplinary complaint against John Eastman, a main player in the plot to ove...

January 29, 2023 A few weeks ago, the head of a company called DoNotPay offered a million dollars to anyone who’d let his a chatbot argue a ...

 The ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility and ABA Standing Committee on Professional Regulation is seeking comme...

 Here is a link to an article and a video discussion on why John Eastman should be disciplined.

Last week, the State Bar of California filed 11 disciplinary charges against attorney John Eastman based on his efforts to help overturn the...

In November 2021, the Idaho State Bar Commissioners recommended an amendment to Idaho Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4 to include anti-discr...

Yesterday I reported that a federal court imposed almost a million dollars in sanctions on Donald Trump and his lawyers for a frivolous case...

It can't be a good thing for the petitioner when the opinion of the court starts by saying "This case should never have been brough...

 As I reported yesterday, California is moving quickly to approve a modified version of Model Rule 8.3.   Click here for the full text of th...

Up to now, California is the only state that has not adopted some version of Model Rule 8.3 which requires lawyers to report another lawyer...

If you are interested in the topic of jury nullification, Radio Lab has a recent 1 hour long podcast on the subject.  You can listen to it h...

January 9, 2023 If you are reading this blog, you probably know already that the US Supreme Court agreed to hear a case on whether a communi...

Above the Law is reporting that last Wednesday New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron sent a note to lawyers for the Trump family and...

 A lawyer for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been suspended from practicing law in Connecticut for six months for improperly giving Jone...

 As reported in Louisiana Legal Ethics , last year, the Louisiana Legislature enacted La. Rev. Stat. 9:5605.2, which provides that "[i]...

 A bar discipline committee in Washington, D.C., has concluded that Rudy Giuliani violated at least one professional rule in his efforts to ...