The leak of millions of documents apparently hacked from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonesca has exposed the tax strategies of some of the world’s elite. But the Panama Papers also shine a light on some failures of Mossack Fonesca to screen out problematic clients — failures of due diligence that the firm itself recognized.
Petropars
In today’s soft legal services market, some aspiring members of the profession feel pressure to work for free, but the fairness of such arrangements in general has come under scrutiny. In a twist, the New York State Bar Association earlier this month said that law firms could bill clients for services provided by unpaid legal interns, as long as the amount is not excessive, and the internship program complies with applicable law.
We’ve blogged about this before, but if you need any more reasons to be sure that you document who your client is and is not, see the Oregon court of appeals opinion in Lahn v. Vaisbort.
“I represent only your brother”
In Lahn, the lawyer had represented the plaintiff, her brother and
What’s ethical may nonetheless not be a best practice — timely advice from the ethics committee of the New York State Bar Association, which weighed in recently with an ethics opinion on the practice of blind copying your client on e-mails you send to opposing counsel.
The inquiry to the NYSBA’s Committee on Professional Ethics
What should you do when you have a thorny legal ethics problem that comes up in the course of representing a client? The answer is not “Call Ghostbusters.” There are a variety of ways to get ethics advice, and some could be better than others in putting you in the best position in case someone
Did you make a New Year’s resolution to shift gears in your law practice? Maybe start practicing in a new area of the law that is unfamiliar to you? It’s always fine to add new skills, of course, and marketing yourself in new ways can be a good strategy for bringing in more revenue in
What was the most important development in the legal ethics arena over the past five years? I was honored to be asked by LexBlog, the folks who provide our blog platform, to share my views on this topic on the LXBN network, which has 8,000+ blog authors. But of course, the invitation also made
If you only agree to be “local counsel” in a matter, you can rest assured that your limited undertaking also limits the scope of your duties — right? Wrong — as a recent disciplinary case and recent ethics opinion point out.
No “local counsel exception” to conduct rules
If your law school friend is serving
A Florida Bar rule blocking a personal injury law firm from stating that it specializes in mass-tort cases is unconstitutional as applied, a Florida federal district court recently held. The court enjoined the Florida Bar from enforcing its Rule 4-7.14(a)(4), which prohibits statements “that a lawyer is … a specialist, an expert, or other
Bartering for goods and services seems old-fashioned, even primitive — after all, that’s why money was invented, right? But bartering might be viewed as a component of today’s “sharing economy,” which involves more-direct, Internet-facilitated interactions between consumers and providers.
A recent informal opinion of the Connecticut Bar Association Standing Committee on Professional Ethics