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.
My spouse and I visited Chicago years ago, and confusedly started driving the wrong way down a one-way street. We were promptly pulled over by one of the Windy City’s finest. I gave him my best smile, and said, “Sorry, officer, we’re from out of town.” He grunted, “Don’t they have one-way streets where you come from?” But he didn’t give us a ticket. A recent disciplinary opinion out of Oklahoma, involving a tech-challenged bankruptcy lawyer, brings the story to mind.
A lawyer’s duty of care to a client does not include raising claims on the client’s behalf that are merely “colorable,” and not actually “viable,” the Oregon Supreme Court held last month. The court quoted with approval from an amicus brief from the state’s mandatory provider of malpractice insurance, which said that a “colorability” standard would only promote “scorched earth litigation,” and expose lawyers to “hindsight bias.”
You’re chatting with your pals at the bar association cocktail hour, and talk turns to the indictment just handed down against a former city official. Someone says, “Hey, didn’t your firm used to represent her?” “Yes,” you reply, “and a couple years ago, I had a really interesting case involving her. Maybe I shouldn’t discuss
Internal discussions among Orrick’s chief legal officer and other firm lawyers about a conflict of interest remain privileged under federal common law, a federal magistrate judge for the Northern District of California has held, in quashing a third-party subpoena directed to the firm — even though the firm still represented the client at the time of the discussions. The opinion is the latest in the line of federal and state cases that have been developing a jurisprudence of law-firm privilege.
A Florida judge resigned last week in the wake of a state judicial ethics investigation launched after he accepted baseball tickets from a law firm that was litigating a slip-and-fall case before him. The outcome for the judge seems like a foregone conclusion, but it also is a timely reminder for lawyers about the ethics rules governing their interactions with judges.
A Florida appeals court has affirmed $350,000 in punitive damages awarded to a lawyer who claimed that a former client defamed her in on-line reviews. Some courts have turned back claims based on internet reviews. But in Blake v. Ann-Marie Giustibelli, P.A., the court said there was no free-speech shield for the former client’s false statements on various internet review sites.
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