Does the new year have you thinking about taking on work in a new practice area? Maybe business in your accustomed area is slowing, and you’re considering shifting gears. If so, beware of dabbling in areas where you don’t have the requisite knowledge and skill to provide competent representation to your client.
The ethical duty
It’s cold outside, baby! At least it is here in northeast Ohio. If you live in the frozen north, you might be lucky enough to have a winter home in a more weather-friendly state where you spend part of your time. What if you want to do legal work from there while enjoying the sunshine
Greetings 2018! Time for some ethics trend predictions to kick off the Year of the Dog (according to the Chinese zodiac). Let it be a year in which you doggedly pursue ethical practice (ouch). No more bad puns — here’s what’s hot as we begin the year:
Law firm cyber-security
No surprise here that the
Holiday parties are great times to socialize and network with colleagues. But the casual atmosphere and the sometimes-plentiful adult beverages can also tempt you to tell war stories that reveal too much about your past clients, potentially violating your continuing duty of confidentiality under Model Rule 1.9. But what’s “too much”? If something about
Here’s a year-end reminder to in-house counsel: make sure that you are properly registered and licensed, or you may run into disciplinary problems. An Ohio lawyer who worked in a company’s law department learned that the hard way earlier this month, when she received a two-year suspension from the Ohio Supreme Court, with six
A lawyer representing an eBay seller in a dispute with the seller’s trading agents drew a defamation claim from the agents. But the case had a happy ending for the lawyer, as the New Jersey court of appeals held last month that two letters the lawyer wrote to eBay were protected by the Garden State’s
One of 2017’s biggest legal trends is the upswing in law firm merger activity. Altman Weil’s MergerLine site reports 76 deals announced through 2017 Q3, the most ever recorded through three quarters, with a prediction that there might be 100 mergers by year-end, surpassing the 2015 high of 91.
Firm mergers raise lots of conflicts
Last year at this time, we published this post on gratitude, and it resonated with a lot of lawyers. Here it is again, slightly revised. Have a grateful Thanksgiving holiday.
Looking at the roiling current of world events, many of them dark and discouraging, can justifiably make us anxious and depressed. Our times are marked
When a court orders you to meet and confer with opposing counsel about a discovery dispute, it requires you to do “something more than bickering with [opposing] counsel ….” That’s what a California state appeals court noted in affirming $12,600 in sanctions against a defendant represented by a large national firm. According to the opinion
A Pennsylvania state court judge disqualified Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP earlier this month from appearing for either defendant in a shareholder dispute involving a Philadelphia LLC that provides services to pharmaceutical companies. The opinion spotlights the conflict issues that can come up when representing an entity and its controlling member against a claimed minority