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Ethics

: Legal Ethics Forum

Ethics news (August 23, 2010)

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The ABA has adopted new rules for trust fund accounting. Stories here and here.
From New York Law Journal: Attorney's ties to organized crime family do not present disqualifying conflict. I must be missing something, because according to the article the prosecutors argued that the lawyer's obstruction of justice was to suggest that co-defendants say nothing to law enforcement besides the name of their lawyer. In any case, the lawyer, Joseph Corozzo, was not DQ'd.
In this Tennessee case, Van Grouw v. Malone, a malpractice claim against a "closing attorney" failed. Can any of our readers let us know what the role of a "closing attorney" is, and to whom that attorney normally owes duties?
The Major Legal Baseball Players Association is considering a rule change that would permit sports agents (some of whom are attorneys) to sign non-competes and non-solicitation agreements. Jeff Fabian offers his thoughts.
From Vorhees New Jersey Legal Malpractice Blog: In Sullivan v. Sills Cummis, the court held experienced business people to a high standard, including a duty to read the documents they were signing. Summary judgment for the defendant-lawyers.
From The IndianaLawyer.com comes news of a summary judgment affirmed for a lawyer in a legal malpractice case dealing with limitations on the scope of the representation. The majority opinion, construing 1.2(c) for the first time in Indiana, held that the engagement letter limited the lawyer's scope to the filing of one motion. (It seems possible to me that a lawyer could be hired that narrowly, but it would be unusual.) The concurrence would have read the scope of the representation more broadly, but, regardless, held that the plaintiff didn't point to any steps the lawyers could have taken to change the outcome. The opinion has a transcript of the telephone call wherein the lawyer transmitted the bad news to the client -- which captures one of those very awkward moment's in a lawyer-client relationship.
Here's a brief interview of a Virginia law student who studied legal ethics in the context of the Third Reich's lawyers.
When federal district court judge Martin Feldman enjoined the federal government's moratorium on deep sea drilling in the Gulf, he was criticized for his ties to the oil industry. Judge Feldman ruled that the government's decision to ban drilling had not properly accounted for the economic losses that would ensure. The Wall Street Journal has a follow up on the story, indicating news of previously undisclosed documents showing that the government foresaw that the ban would cost about 23,000 jobs.