With the coronavirus pandemic surging across the US and around the world, my family, along with millions of other Americans, will be sacrificing our usual Thanksgiving celebration in order to stay safe and to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. If you’re a lawyer who’s in the same boat, I hope that, like me,
Business transaction with client violated ethics rules and voided fee agreement, Fifth Circuit holds
Needing to adjust the basis of your legal fee mid-stream is a fairly common occurrence. When a matter becomes more complicated than you originally contemplated, or for other reasons, the fee agreement you entered into with the client at the beginning may become unworkable before the matter is over.
But renegotiating fees with an existing
Lawyer avoids 6th Circuit sanctions; stay-at-home order might have limited his access to record
The plaintiff’s lawyer in a slip-and-fall case got a pandemic-based pass from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals last week, avoiding sanctions that the defendant requested after the lawyer misstated the record. The lawyer had based the plaintiff’s appeal argument on an unsigned interrogatory answer that appeared only in a draft.
But the court in
Playing away from home: Do lawyers charged with legal mal have to defend suits out of state?
Legal malpractice plaintiffs fended off motions to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction in two separate cases, in two different jurisdictions, under opinions that happened to be filed on the same day last week. The opinions, from a New Jersey state appeals court and a North Carolina federal district court, stand as a warning