So, you’ve just met with a potential client and the opportunity to take a fascinating case or close a major deal is at your front door. The catch? The client wants to pay for your services in Bitcoin. Do you accept? Can you accept?
The do’s and the can’s
If you’re licensed in Nebraska the
Four quick takes on social media pratfalls by judges, lawyers and others — just from the last few weeks. Don’t let these happen to you!
After hard-fought proceedings, you’ve finally settled a contentious case on behalf of your client. The plaintiff’s lawyer has brought suit against your client before, and likely will again: the lawyer advertises and uses social media aggressively to locate claimants who have the same kind of issue with your client.
Your client asks, “Can’t we include
Representing a campus sexual assault victim-turned-activist and later using her confidential information in representing an alleged campus assailant with interests adverse to the former client is a “textbook” conflict of interest. That’s the message the Pennsylvania Supreme Court sent in suspending a lawyer for a year in a consent-to-discipline case published this week.
Former -client
What are your ethics obligations when your client gives you documents that the client may not be entitled to have? Model Rule 4.4(b), adopted in some form by most jurisdictions, provides some guidance. Applying it, together with other principles, a New Jersey appeals court, in an unpublished ruling, recently disqualified a firm from
You might remember our report last year on the Florida judge who resigned after accepting Tampa Bay Rays baseball tickets from lawyers who had a pending case before him.
The lawyers were representing plaintiff in a slip-and-fall case against Wal-Mart. The day after the jury came back with a defense verdict, one of the lawyers
We’ve written before about what you can and cannot say when withdrawing from representation. Now a Texas bar ethics opinion adds a twist: what can you tell an insurance company that retains you to represent its insured, when the client won’t cooperate?
Lonely in the Lone Star state
A Texas lawyer had a quandary. An
If you believe that you may have materially erred in a current client’s representation, your duty of communication under Rule 1.4 requires you to inform the client.
That’s the unsurprising conclusion that the ABA’s Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility reached in its latest opinion, issued April 17.
Of note, though, is that
Early last year, the federal Northern District of California became the first court to require — by rule — that a party receiving outside litigation funding must disclose the arrangement. As we described, the rule is limited to class actions; it had been favored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which views it as
In a warning to semi-retired lawyers and others, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month affirmed a 90-day suspension for a lawyer who let others draft and sign his name to deficient pleadings, saying that “a lawyer’s good name and professional reputation are his primary stock in trade, an asset to be cultivated