Just last month, Ohio issued Opinion 2022-07, which allows lawyers to hold cryptocurrency in escrow, under certain conditions. It is no secret that technology tends to outpace the law, so the clarity is certainly welcomed. While this opinion sheds light on murky territory, lawyers still must proceed carefully as many ethical concerns remain.
Property
Remember your first days in law school, when you were introduced to a whole Black’s Law Dictionary-worth of exotic legalese? Words like “estop,” “arguendo” and “gravamen”? (If you’re like us, you’ve spent your post-school days learning how to avoid this jargon and write plain English; but we digress.) Remember “escheatment”? The term of course
“Attorneys carry substantial responsibility, but it is folly to suggest it is limitless,” said the New Jersey Supreme Court last week. The court ruled that when the Fox Rothschild firm complied with its client’s disbursement instructions it did not thereby convert funds that a non-client had wired to the firm’s trust account — even though,
Bitcoin has come a long way since 2010 when Laszlo Hanyecz made the first Bitcoin purchase by paying 10,000 Bitcoins for two Papa John’s pizzas – a pizza order that today would have been worth over $80 million.
In addition to the pizza giant, some law firms are now accepting cryptocurrencies in exchange for legal
A former part-time Ohio judge and bankruptcy trustee whose bookkeeper was convicted of stealing funds from his trust account was publicly reprimanded last week for failing to reconcile his trust account monthly and failing to adequately supervise his staff. The court’s opinion spotlights the potential legal ethics problems that dishonest non-lawyer staff can create. Below
Everyone knows that we have an ethical duty of competence, and in most jurisdictions this includes a duty to be aware of the “benefits and risks” of relevant technology. Examples of possible technology issues affecting our practices: encryption (and cyber-security in general), cloud storage, e-mail handling, the internet of things — there
A Washington lawyer was disbarred last month by the state supreme court in a disciplinary case with an interesting array of issues: the heavy penalties for using trust account money to “rob Peter to pay Paul;” the danger of treating the representation of a relative too casually; “compassion fatigue” as a potential mitigating factor in
The ABA Ethics Committee last week issued an opinion aimed at giving guidance on a sometimes-puzzling question: what portions of the file does a lawyer have to provide to a client at the end of the matter — including a client who pulls the plug on the representation?
In Opinion 471, the Committee interpreted Model