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Ethics

Legal Ethics Forum

Covering Legal Ethics

Post Frequency: 11.2/day

Last Entry: August 14, 2020 at 13:23:48

Legal ethics roundup (August 18, 2010)

Posted on August 18, 2010
Under a new Seventh Circuit decision, US v. Williams, district courts must make inquiry whenever a defendant complains about his/her attorney. (h/t: Wisconsin Law Journal) This new unpublished opinion, State v. Smith, from the California Court of Appeal illustrates the...

Jayashri Srikantiah & Jennifer Lee Koh, "Teaching Individual Representation Alongside Institutional Advocacy: Pedagogical Implications of a Combined Advocacy Clinic"

Posted on August 17, 2010
Article. Abstract: A growing number of clinics have adopted a combined advocacy model, in which students both represent individual clients and participate in broader-scale projects to achieve social change. Combined advocacy clinics permit students to learn about working for social...

Legal ethics roundup (August 17, 2010)

Posted on August 17, 2010
From ALM: Latham helped found a medical-legal clinic that assists indigent patients. (Pro bono semi-MDP?) The Ninth Circuit, in FTC v. Network Services Depot, ruled that lawyers have a duty of inquiry about retainers that may have their source in...

Top-Tier Law Firms and Corporate Disclosure

Posted on August 17, 2010
I recommend a new paper by Georgetown B-School profs Peeti Choudhary, Jason Schloetzer, and Jason Sturgess titled "Top-Tier Law Firms and Corporate Disclosure: Evidence From Regulatory Noncompliance." The authors study compliance rates with mandatory Form 12b-25 (Notification of Late Filing)...

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Chamber of Commerce opposes FASB 5

Posted on August 17, 2010
No surprise there, but here's their letter. From the lawyer's point of view, the notion that a prediction about litigation will be publicly disclosed makes no sense for the company or its shareholders. But from the administrative point of view,...

Ethics Issues in Litigation over the NYC Mosque

Posted on August 16, 2010
See: http://www.aclj.org/media/pdf/ACLJ_EXECUTED-PETITION_20100804.pdf This complaint was filed against the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission seeking to compel reversal of the Commission?s decision to allow destruction of a nineteenth century building and its replacement with a new building that will be...

The Myth of the Golden Age

Posted on August 16, 2010
I highly recommend, the superb new book by Stuart M. Speiser, "The Founding Lawyers and America?s Quest for Justice." I urge ethicists in particular to read his chapter, "The Myth of the Purifying Lawyer-Statesman," in which Speiser demolishes the Kronman-Glendon-et...

A Question Raised at Stanford: What's the Rule? What Should It Be?

Posted on August 16, 2010
This question, reduced to hypothetical format, arose at the Stanford conference. What is the answer now and what should it be? "Joe is a partner in firm X's office in a state A that does not recognize non-consensual screening of...

Legal ethics odds and ends (August 12, 2010)

Posted on August 12, 2010
FASB proposes new standards for "audit letters." It's an arcane world -- dealing with the "treaty" between lawyers and accountants and the "Standard No. 5" -- but it's ably explained at Cal Biz Lit. (h/t: Point of Law) At Australian...

Justice Index

Posted on August 11, 2010
Today's NYT Op-Ed page features an interesting piece by Amy Bach recommending a new mechanism to assess how America's courts are functioning. (LEF readers might recall my post this past spring reflecting on her book Ordinary Injustice and Atul Gawande's...

Federal Circuit applies balancing test after "substantial relationship" test is met

Posted on August 10, 2010
The Federal Circuit, applying Fifth Circuit law, rejected a writ seeking disqualification of an intellectual property firm where a former partner had given advice (but did not bill the client) on a matter related to the litigation. Even where the...

Round-up of briefing in Therasense (the inequitable conduct case before the Federal Circuit)

Posted on August 09, 2010
Opinions, briefs, etc., are all usefully gathered at Patently-O.

Legal ethics bits and pieces (August 9, 2010)

Posted on August 09, 2010
From ALM, an article with thoughts from Carole Silver and Susan Hackett on state-based regulation of the legal profession. From the DC Bar, "To help lawyers navigate the ever-changing ethics rules, the D.C. Bar Continuing Legal Education Program will offer...

The Constitution Project, "Prosecute Terrorism Suspect, not their Lawyers"

Posted on August 09, 2010
White paper here. The introduction focuses on the Cully Stimson attack, the Liz Cheney attack, and the legislative proposal that lawyers representing detainees be subject to investigation by the Department of Defense Inspector General. Regarding that third issue, someone has...

David F. Levi, "In defense of young lawyers"

Posted on August 09, 2010
David Levi, former federal judge and current dean of Duke Law School, offers this op-ed about young lawyers. Dean Levi purports to counter the market-based criticism that many law school graduates aren't prepared to be economically useful upon graduation, but...

Kurt Melchior and Jerome Sapiro, Jr., "Why [California's] Proposed New Rules of Professional Conduct Should Be Rejected"

Posted on August 08, 2010
Article here from members of the Rules Revision Commission. I agree with them on most of the facts they assert, but disagree with their conclusions. Here's a taste of what they dislike: The current Rules of Professional Conduct and the...

Supreme Court of California tells lawyers to limit their evidentiary objections in summary judgment practice

Posted on August 06, 2010
If an evidentiary objection has merit, but isn't critical to the motion at hand, should an ethical lawyer decline to raise the objection, out of a duty to the court, the opponent, and the system? In the course of rendering...

"Mohammad Mostafaei: 'I Had The Right To Defend Sakineh Mohammadi'"

Posted on August 06, 2010
For anyone who values the role of lawyers and the rule of law, this interview with Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe is must reading. (Franco Tarulli, at The Ethical Lawyer, has thoughts here.) Do any of our readers know of any...

Mother Jones investigatory article on possible fraud in foreclosure cases

Posted on August 06, 2010
Interesting article here, alleging that court documents were backdated because proving who actually owned the mortgage was difficult and time-consuming.

Stephen Bainbridge: "Judicial recusals and politics make a bad mix"

Posted on August 06, 2010
Post here. Just in the years we've been blogging, we've seen politics flavor recusal motions and opinion pieces in the Scalia duck hunting case, Caperton, the Gulf Oil drilling moratorium case, and the Prop 8 case (California's new same sex...

When lawyers attack bloggers

Posted on August 06, 2010
A lawyer didn't like what the Overlawyered site site said about him, so the lawyer eventually sued. But he sued too late.

Tulane's new book on hot topics in legal ethics

Posted on August 06, 2010
"Hot TopicS in the Legal Profession 2010" is available here. I had previously downloaded a copy via Kindle. (Disclaimer (or warning?): the book says nice things about Legal Ethics Forum in the Foreward.) Alan Childress of Legal Profession Blog was...

Karen Sypher convicted of extortion

Posted on August 06, 2010
News here. Her lawyer had an intimate relationship with her and made an eight-figure demand on University of Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino.

Judge's comments at legal conferences lead to recusal motion in important patent case

Posted on August 05, 2010
Dennis Crouch has the details at Patently-O. If the motion is successful, I imagine judges will be more careful about saying anything interesting at conferences.

Stanley Fish, Law and Order and Theories of Ethics

Posted on August 05, 2010
In Monday?s NYT, Stanley Fish had a column on the moral universe of Law and Order (here) . He argues that Law and Order presents a deep aversion to exceptionalism, to people or categories of people who believe they are...

Legal Outsourcing in the News

Posted on August 05, 2010
The New York Times published this story today about the growth of legal process outsourcing (LPO) to India. The trend is far from new. We've been discussing the ethics-related issues of LPO for a couple of years (see here, here,...

Airgas: breach of fiduciary duty suit may proceed against Cravath (although Airgas's prior motion to DQ Cravath had been rejected)

Posted on August 05, 2010
When the Cravath firm helped Air Products make a hostile bid for Airgas, Airgas unsuccessfully sought to disqualify the firm. Now a federal judge has ruled that Airgas's breach of fiduciary duty suit against Cravath has survived an attack on...

Legal ethics items (August 4, 2010)

Posted on August 04, 2010
News account: "Twenty professors of legal ethics from law schools around the country are named in a brief filed in Superior Court Monday which accuses former Family Court Chief Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah Jr. and the magistrates who run the...

" . . . a profession whose members are not dependent on government for the right to practice"

Posted on August 04, 2010
The NYT reports on the ACLU's new suit, challenging what it characterizes as the federal government's control over who may represented American-born Anwar al-Awlaki. The ACLU complaint is here. The allegations bring to mind these portions of the Preamble to...

A lawyer's demand letter vs. extortion? (Flatley and the Karen Sypher trial)

Posted on August 03, 2010
One of the recurring issues in the law of lawyering is deciding when a lawyer's demand letter is simply lawyering in the lawful sense and when it's extortion in the criminal sense. In California, we had the Flatley case, in...

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