All in Lawyers Behaving Badly
All eyes are on the Middle District of Pennsylvania, which is set to hear arguments in one of the Trump Campaign’s voting lawsuits today. Enter Rudy Giuliani, who has applied for pro hac vice admission despite his last federal court appearance being before some lawyers were born.
However, it looks like Rudy may have some problems right out of the gate, in addition to all of his other problems.
Todd Banks’ valiant attempt to invalidate Al Johnson’s Restaurant’s Goats on the Roof trade dress as “demeaning to goats” (chronicled here in December) has ended not with a bang, or a whimper, or even with a fish fry, but with a denial of a cert petition.
I don’t think you need to be an ethics attorney or an attorney at all to know you generally need your client to be a client and to know that they’re a client before filing a lawsuit on their behalf and then litigating it for two years and then having it dismissed with a petition for attorney’s fees made against you.
I write about lawyers behaving badly a lot (at least, not when I’m not neglecting this blog-hi everyone, I hope you’ve been well) but one thing I don’t do is comment on Wisconsin lawyers with potential or pending matters. I’ll cite published opinions regarding Wisconsin lawyers, but only in rare cases will I discuss a case in any other context (and then, onl if it’s very publicly clear that I am not their lawyer).
In my ethics nerd friend circles, we often discuss “those cases.” “Those cases” either involve attorney discipline or judges admonishing attorneys for allegedly bad behavior outside of the disciplinary cases; they’re not of great importance or precedential value by themselves. But they act as cautionary tales and generate extra publicity and discussion (at least in my ethics nerd friend circles) because they involve some combination of vulgarity, sex, “really, you have a law license and thought this was a good idea?” and/or general silliness.
When I launched this site back in October I intended it to be a site for discussion of legal ethics. I mean, it’s right there in the title (sort of; perhaps I should add getting “ethicking” added to the dictionary to my bucket list). Disciplinary decisions, new rules, general nerdery. Some current events but “it’s not about politics, and it’s not going to be about politics,” or so I told my employer when making the pitch.
With all due respect to my judge friends, I think most of us who litigate have been tempted to ask, “are you serious, judge?” in court at one point or another. But (I would hope) most of us know better than to actually say it out loud.
Enter Todd Banks of Queens, New York, who seems to have a problem with a lot of things.
I know I’ve been remiss in covering this, and I’m not going to get into the merits of a defamation claim brought by a public official (short version: good luck with that), but.
For some time, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) has been aggrieved by, well, a Twitter cow.
