Summer can sometimes bring a slight break in a lawyer’s hectic schedule — making it a good time to catch up on TV shows you might have missed while you were doing that deal or briefing that motion for summary judgment over the winter.
I’ve recently been enjoying (read binge-watching) Better Call Saul — it’s
Small may be beautiful, but when it comes to law firms, small can signal disqualification troubles that a bigger firm might sometimes be able to avoid, according to the reasoning of a recent opinion.
We’ve posted here before about screening non-lawyer personnel in order to avoid imputed disqualification when a secretary or paralegal arrives
Only one jurisdiction in the nation — Oregon — requires lawyers to carry legal malpractice insurance. But all the other states have varying requirements about malpractice insurance and disclosing whether or not you carry it. Knowing the rule in your jurisdiction is vital to staying out of ethics trouble.
Disclosure data
A helpful piece by
One of your ethical duties with respect to an Internet scam is to not fall for it, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York Committee on Professional Ethics has said in a new opinion.
Competent? Don’t fall for Nigerian check scam
The Committee considered the ethics rules that apply to
We posted here about the in-house firm counsel privilege, and the New York case that held late last year that the privilege didn’t apply where a malpractice plaintiff was seeking to discover all relevant communications of his former lawyers.
The opinion in Stock v. Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP is in the New York
Some law firms or solos searching for efficiency and ways to trim overhead have considered arrangements with a “professional employer organization,” or PEO. A PEO, which some states permit by statute, is a separate company to which an organization allocates some or all of its human resources functions. The PEO sometimes acts as a co-employer
LinkedIn has achieved remarkable market penetration among lawyers. Ninety-five percent of ABA members report that they have profiles. (Preceding link requires LEXIS subscription.) Many law firms turn to LinkedIn’s premium offering, “Reference Search,” to help them vet job candidates by finding references — others who have worked with candidates at their former firms. But
Although almost every U.S. jurisdiction now has some version of the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct, some of us who have been around awhile remember the old Disciplinary Rules, which governed lawyer conduct under the former Model Code of Professional Responsibility. (Or maybe you remember the Disciplinary Rules because you practice in a state
It’s a scenario that all trial lawyers are familiar with. Your client is testifying at deposition. She gets a little confused and her testimony reflects it. After a line of questioning concludes, you request a break, leave the room with your client and confer. When the deposition resumes, your client changes her testimony, perhaps significantly.
Sometimes our lessons come in more bizarre ways than others. As reported by Law360 last week (subscription required), three Florida lawyers were charged by disciplinary authorities over a January 2013 incident involving the firm’s paralegal. The three lawyers were defending defamation claims against their client, who was a local radio talk show host known as