* Our guest blogger is a Certified Compliance & Ethics Professional (CCEP)® in Thompson Hine’s Dayton, Ohio office.
A growing list of businesses are eager to promote a strong culture of ethical corporate compliance, and lawyers should be ready to get on board by developing knowledge and skills to address this need.
Companies devoting resources
Dissolving a law firm is a process, not an event, the D.C. Bar Legal Ethics Committee said in a new opinion released earlier this month, and some ethical obligations continue even after dissolution. “The paramount” principle, said the committee, is to “continue to competently, zealously and diligently represent and communicate with the clients during the
This is a good one for the law school legal ethics class I’m teaching this semester: If a company’s lawyer approves a policy that may be legal in itself, but the lawyer knows that the company will use it to evade the law, has the lawyer violated ethics rules?
An analogous question arose last week
Following an $8 million settlement in a personal injury suit, the New York Court of Appeals held that a fee-sharing agreement between two lawyers was enforceable, even though it violated ethics requirements. The court said that counsel’s failure to inform her client and obtain consent to the fee split was a “serious ethical violation,” but
There should be a word that’s the opposite of “schadenfreude” — you know, that evocative German term that means “secret pleasure at another’s misfortune.” Maybe there is such a word, but the one I’m searching for would convey the sense of “Please, let me not fall into the same error” as some other person did, because under the right (or wrong) circumstances we can all make ethical mistakes. Here are three cautionary tales. You may read them and wonder how the lawyers involved came to such grief — or you may just be thankful that it wasn’t you, or that the demons these lawyers struggled with aren’t yours.