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Ethics

Legal Ethics Forum

Covering Legal Ethics

Post Frequency: 11.2/day

Last Entry: August 14, 2020 at 13:23:48

Unethical Obedience By Subordinate Attorneys: Lessons from Social Psychology

Posted on May 05, 2008
This article, which I just posted on SSRN, describes in more detail some of the ideas contained in this op-ed. Here's the abstract: This Article explores the lessons that we can learn from social psychology regarding a lawyer's willingness to...

John Yoo's Torture Memos: Lessons for All of Us

Posted on May 02, 2008
I just published an op-ed in the National Law Journal, where I suggest that John Yoo may have written his torture memos for some of the same reasons that people applied 450 volt electric shocks to a bound older man...

Law Prof Sues Students for Defamation

Posted on May 02, 2008
An ABA article is here. The NYT's coverage, here. I looked for the complaint, but couldn't find it on the Arkansas judiciary site.

Interesting Twist on File Ownership Issue

Posted on May 02, 2008
Timothy McVeigh's attorney donated his file to the Univerity of Texas at Austin. The file was appraised at $300,000 and he sought a tax deduction. The IRS disallowed it because he didn't own the file. Jones v. Comm'r of Internal...

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Sample Legal Ethics Expert Retainer Letter

Posted on May 01, 2008
A legal ethics listserv recently had some back and forth about retainer letters for legal ethics experts and what should be in them. During last year's National Conference on Professional Responsibility, there was a great panel on legal ethics experts...

"I confess to being a social conservative, but it does not affect my views on cases."

Posted on April 29, 2008
That's a quote from Justice Scalia. I'm sure that Justice Scalia believe that his political ideology doesn't affect his decision making, but is this cabining of ideology possible to the extent that he suggests? Much ink has been spilled on...

60 Minutes Interview of Justice Scalia

Posted on April 28, 2008
You can watch it here.

Character and Fitness Testing for Law School Applicants

Posted on April 28, 2008
I frequently get bar admission questions around this time of year. A common one is whether a student?s prior brush with the law will impact her application to the bar. Obviously, bar applicants have to report prior convictions and the...

Galanter and Henderson's "The Elastic Tournament: The Second Transformation of the Big Law Firm"

Posted on April 22, 2008
This article, which will be appearing soon in the Stanford Law Review, sounds fascinating. And given who the authors are, it's undoubtedly a good one. Here's the abstract: In 1991, Galanter and Palay published 'Tournament of Lawyers: The Transformation of...

New Trial for Alton Logan

Posted on April 21, 2008
For followers of the Alton Logan story (here and here), a judge has ordered that Mr. Logan receive a new trial.

The Ongoing Push for Screening

Posted on April 20, 2008
Screening is a fraud on the public and makes a monkey of the idea that law is a profession and that lawyers are their clients? fiduciaries. In order to understand the problems raised by screening, consider a typical case. Attorney...

Class rank and bar passage: some data is released

Posted on April 19, 2008
There was interesting news this week at Berkeley. (Follow that link to the Nuts & Boalts website.) In response to a low bar passage rate for the last bar exam, Dean Edley disclosed to 3Ls the bar passage rates by...

Bill Henderson & Andrew Morriss put the US News & World rankings in the right context, then provide hard data and common sense

Posted on April 16, 2008
In the past few years, it's been exciting to see the recent empirical work being done on the profession, and it's not surprising that once again Bill Henderson and Andrew Morriss bring us common sense and hard data -- this...

Metadata Opinion from the New York County Bar

Posted on April 16, 2008
Add this opinion to the growing list of bar opinions on whether a lawyer can look at the metadata contained in an adversary's electronic documents. In the non-litigation context, the New York County Bar says that the answer should be...

"Federal Ethics Law" Grows

Posted on April 14, 2008
Long ago in Texas, the federal courts applied the Texas Rules in deciding disqualification motions; then, two disqualification motions were filed in Texas federal courts which resulted in two opinions from the Fifth Circuit holding that "federal law" -- not...

Dear Rules Revision Commission: Conflict Waivers

Posted on April 14, 2008
Richard Zitrin's comment on proposed CA Rule 1.7 prompts me to float an idea for revising the rule to adopt more of a presumptive safe harbor approach. It entails spelling out in some detail what has to be disclosed, in...

Fire John Yoo?

Posted on April 11, 2008
In response to an on-line petition demanding that UC-Berkeley fire John Yoo from his position as a tenured professor of law, Brian Leiter posted a spirited defense of the value of tenure. Marty Lederman followed up by posting a memo...

Dear Rules Revision Commission: 1.13

Posted on April 09, 2008
The new batch of proposed CA rules includes a revised rule 1.13. Three Two quick comments. 1. The rule departs from the MR by incorporating the current 3-100/6068(e) limits on the ability of counsel to disclose client information. That is...

California county government may hire civil action contingency lawyers

Posted on April 09, 2008
It's not necessarily a conflict of interest, as the trial court had held below. Decision here. (Santa Clara County v. Superior Court) Story, behind reg wall, here, with key graf: "Private counsel serving in such a subordinate role," Sixth District...

A proposed revision to proposed CA rule 1.7

Posted on April 07, 2008
As you may have heard, California is revising its disciplinary rules. Our rules revision commission issued a batch of proposed rules recently, and ethics mavens (including me) are busily writing comments on the proposal. The proposed rule 1.7 has been...

Brief in Duke lacrosse lawsuit cites our blog

Posted on April 07, 2008
This is kind of cool: a brief in the new Duke lacrosse lawsuit cites Monroe Freedman's post on this blog. (See fn. 1) In the suit, the defendants have moved to prevent a blog from making extra-judicial statements that may...

Texas Approves Use of Insurance Company Captive Law Firms

Posted on April 05, 2008
It's been a major battle that the UPL committee had been winning, as this article notes, but the Texas Supreme Court reversed that committee's policy and authorized the use of captive firms to represent insureds. The opinion, Unauthorized Practice of...

The Lawyer World is Almost Flat

Posted on April 04, 2008
Here's a very informative and useful article from Time Magazine about the outsourcing of legal work to India. (Hat tip to the ABA e-Journal.) I firmly believe that outsourcing is going to be a big issue in the coming years...

Please, please, please

Posted on April 03, 2008
Let this not be true. DM

Inadvertent Disclosure at U.S. News

Posted on April 03, 2008
I noted last week that, in its online law school rankings, U.S. News had listed the third and fourth tier schools in rank order rather than in alphabetical order, as they always had done in the past. Suspecting that U.S....

Roundup of big claims against big corporate firms

Posted on April 02, 2008
Amanda Bronstad of the National Law Journal writes that "[l]aw firms are having mixed success in dismissing a growing number of high-dollar malpractice and fraud claims brought over failed corporate deals." She's got the details in the article. Trustess (standing...

Virginia Seeking Comments on Patent Agent-Lawyer Partnerships

Posted on April 02, 2008
Virginia is seeking public comment on what is in my specialty a common and troublesome question: can a lawyer and a patent agent form a partnership, and so share fees, without violating whatever ethical rules -- those of the Patent...

Now available: more OLC "torture memos" written by John Yoo

Posted on April 01, 2008
Via the Balkinization site (by way of Volokh). Memos here and here. These will be closely analyzed in the next few days and weeks. Balkinization suggests that the procedural history of the memos needs explanation. More to follow, no doubt....

Patent Malpractice Cases - Some Thoughts

Posted on April 01, 2008
One thing I focus on is ethical issues in patent practice (prosecution and litigation), and to a lesser extent, issues that arise in trademark practice. I've been doing it for about 20 years (yes, that makes me feel old), and...

Odd and Ends about Previous Posts (as reported by the WSJ Law Blog)

Posted on March 30, 2008
Regarding Ben Kuehne, the Miami criminal defense lawyer who was criminally charged for rendering an ethics opinion approving of Roy Black's receipt of legal fees from an alleged drug kingpin: we've heard the extraordinary rumor -- we repeat "rumor" --...

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