Is currently sort of a question it seems. It is not the world’s most pressing question, but it is a discussion topic in the world of the practice of law getting some extensive media scrutiny in legal publications. For example, here, here, and here. For those not fully enmeshed in the topic already, the issue is … well there are actually two ways to frame what the issue is. The first is whether it is somehow offensive or demeaning for lawyers to refer to people who are involved in assisting with the delivery of legal services but who are not actually lawyers as “non-lawyers.” The second is whet ..read more

Let’s play a blogpost game we haven’t played in a long time. (Yeah, I know, you’re saying to yourself … well that could be anything since you took all of March 2024 off buddy. A month or so seems long, but it’s actually been almost 7 years since I whipped out the “bad or worst” framing.) Let’s talk about a very recent ethics opinion that really has its problems. Thanks to it being disseminated earlier this week on the APRL listserv, I’ve learned about the issuance of Massachusetts Bar Association Ethics Opinion 2024-2. You can read the whole thing here: MBA Ethics Op 2024-2 27-051-24Download F ..read more

Stop me if I’ve said this before … but I’m a bad blogger. With that out of the way, here is something exceedingly rare and that caught my attention — a court ordering that a lawyer, who had already been disbarred, was now no longer entitled to even file things in court on a pro se basis. The matter involves a former Colorado attorney — Kazazian — who was disbarred not quite a year ago as a result of her pursuit of “long-running frivolous legal actions across multiple jurisdictions.” The order of disbarment discussed how that severe sanction was necessary “to protect the integrity of the legal ..read more

It has been a minute since I’ve had a decent reason to write a post regarding efforts of law firms to try to come up with ways around the ethical restriction imposed by RPC 5.6(a) in jurisdictions that track the Model Rules. A recent Colorado case does the trick. (And, thankfully it does, because otherwise I was going to find myself writing about the bananas nonsense that lawyers in Texas are helping Greg Abbott pursue that could lead to a new civil war.) That case — Johnson Family Law (doing business as Modern Family Law) v. Bursek involved a law firm that decided to sue its former associate ..read more

Let’s end 2023 on a high note, shall we? Governor Hochul must be high. She just vetoed a bill that would have finally ended New York’s requirement that New York lawyers have to have an office in New York. Yes, you heard that right. Despite all of the talk in the legal profession of the need to re-regulate the profession to recognize the reality of remote practice, New York still labors under a law enacted in 1909 that makes it unlawful for someone who has a New York law license to practice law without a physical office located in New York state. This massive step backwards cannot be laid at th ..read more

It is very hard to get very far in any sort of “end of year” evaluation of legal ethics questions without talking about the rise of generative AI, how to use it ethically, and what its rapid (and continuing) development will mean for the practice of law. I’ve written earlier this year about the unfortunate (and unnecessary) immediate trend among judges, as something of a backlash to a high-profile instance of lawyers misusing generative AI and then lying about it, to enact certification requirements for lawyers. It seemed, for at least a little bit, that such a trend might have petered out. Un ..read more

We will call it: An update on something I could have sworn I wrote about but didn’t. After some events in Tennessee that I did write about, a number of petitions were filed to seek to enact some changes to rules in Tennessee related to the admission of attorneys. The first filing in the series involved a private activist group asking that something less than “full-time” employment as an attorney count when adding up the number of years required to be eligible for comity admission in our state. That proposal was the subject of widespread support in the public comments received and, ultimately ..read more

Let’s just blow past the usual excuses when I go this long without posting and jump right in instead. Ok? Great. Today, the United States Supreme Court has adopted and released a Code of Judicial Ethics to which they say they will adhere. You can read the whole thing here. Having written a few times in the past about the topic — and the need for ethics rules that would apply to the Court — I cannot now say that this is not a positive development. Most always I will agree that the perfect can be the enemy of the good. This code is certainly not perfect though. Setting aside the simple logistics ..read more

(If the pop culture reference doesn’t automatically make sense to you, you can scroll to the end for an explanation.) In addition to representing lawyers and law firms over the years, I’ve also represented quite a few law students during their application and admissions process and had to handle a few Show Cause hearings where the admissions body has questions about the “character and fitness” of the applicant. That fact is my jumping off point for discussing a recent Ohio decision denying an applicant admission to the bar there that presents a rare example of showing both what a good characte ..read more

First of all, I know I am long overdue for new content here. There have been quite a few things that caught my eye that I wanted to write about, but there were so many to choose from it got into a weird, overwhelming, and highly unusual sort of “writer’s block” situation. Second, some anniversaries came and went since my last post, including celebrating the first anniversary of the founding of my solo practice at Faughnan Law, PLLC. Third, that should be enough to overcome the block … right? Write. Here comes the actual substantive ethics content… An interesting new white paper was brought to ..read more