Joshua Browder, CEO of a company called “DoNotPay” (which bills itself as “the World’s First Robot Lawyer”*) announced on Twitter that the company would pay any person $1,000,000 (and later, $5,000,000) to cede control of their Supreme Court argument to its OpenAI-based “robot lawyer.” The lawyer or pro se party arguing the case would wear AirPods and “let our robot lawyer argue the case by repeating exactly what it says.”
I’d like to kick off the new year of blogging with an update. Remember Alex Jones’s lawyers? The one who belatedly turned over a bunch of his client’s text messages, but with it dumped some confidential records (including medical records) of some of the the Sandy Hook families?
In what seems like lightning speed, one of the lawyers, last week Norman Pattis, was suspended for six months from the practice of law by a Connecticut judge. (No, this was not the one in Texas who chose to close with a quote from the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller. There is a lot going on here.)
I hope everyone is planning a restful and warm holiday. I may or may not be blogging more this year (that’s always a spur-of-the-moment decision), so in the meantime, I’ll leave you with a few little stocking stuffers/nuggets of coal (depending on your perspective).
Yesterday, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol held its last hearing and released the introductory report to its findings. The full report will not be released until tomorrow, but the summary material (which is 154 pages in itself) provides a robust roadmap.
I watched some of yesterday’s hearing, and, I’m sure, like any other member of the ethics bar who may have been listening, my ears perked up when Rep. Lofgren outlined efforts by lawyers to influence witnesses and disrupt the investigation.
Hello readers! It has been awhile, hasn’t it? I hit three years and then promptly disappeared.
Hopefully I’ll be blogging more frequently now that the midterms are over and were not nearly as eventful as 2020 (for which we all should be grateful), but to tide you over in the meantime, some quick hits:
The ABA Journal has reported the curious case of a solo practitioner, Donald Brown, who was suspended for misrepresenting his attendance at Internet-based CLE (and, also, reprimanded him for representing a client in a divorce case after they had been in an intimate relationship, giving rise to a material limitation conflict under its version of Rule 1.7 that was not consented to in writing by the client).
This caught my eye for both the reason for the suspension and the potential impossibility of fulfilling conditions of staying the suspension.
Hi, students I may have met or who may have stumbled upon this through other means. I’m happy to answer questions—I respond well to a social media “subpoena” even though I know I don’t have to and probably shouldn’t. Here are 10 of the answers I’ve given over the years when law student and new graduates have asked about what I didn’t know in law school but should have.
Above The Law has reported the case of a now-former Dentons associate in Illinois, who was assigned a document review project. In pop culture, document review has been portrayed as punitive, or potentially simple enough for a high school student to handle (sadly I could not find the clip from “Clueless” where Cher had to highlight telephone conversations occurring on September 3).
First, greetings from the Covid Penalty Box. The plague finally hit my household last week, and I’m in time out for a bit. I’m feeling okay enough, but I am not 100%. The good(?) news is I was supposed to be on vacation this week so my calendar was already clear. Sigh.
Anyway, I am working a little bit this week (to make up for the work I couldn’t do while actively sick last week) and I have found I have the attention span of a banana, which I suppose is to be expected. Needless to say, I am not the last set of eyes on anything this week (except for my incessant boredom tweeting, and I guess this blog entry, but hey, if I mess this up you all will let me know).
So, when I came across this story in Above The Law, I added “don’t send any work-related group texts” to my mental list of what not to do this week.
As I write this, I’ve spent the last two weeks preparing for and then actually in trial, with a two-day interruption for a nerd friend conference. I am finally done, and am using the one functioning brain cell I have that isn’t devoted to keeping me upright to write this, while it’s fresh.*
This post is directed at anyone who needs to deal with a lawyer after a major project is over, so I am going to write directly to those people. They may be people who are married to or partnered with lawyers, who are close friends, or who live with lawyers.
I’ve been deep in trial prep the last few days (and ahead of seeing my nerd friends at the Chicago conference, but that doesn’t mean my phone hasn’t been utterly lit up, as happens whenever a lawyer does something dumb on television. From my office, with headphones on, I could hear the collective gasps of my friends as they watched Alex Jones and his lawyer Andino Reynal have a meltdown in real time yesterday.
What happened yesterday (some video here) was, alternately (and with apologies to random social media people who made these comments but I can’t find to credit), an EPR class issue-spotting nightmare, an object lesson in FAFO, and/or a Nerd Conference Eve Present for those of us in the ethics bar.
Recently, a viral Twitter conversation asked participants born before 1990 about their first online purchase. I’m really not sure—was it a book from the early days of Amazon? Some long-forgotten kitchen gadget? I know I was long out of college, but this was still when “e-commerce” was something distinct from just buying stuff. Even though it quickly became apparent that online shopping was secure, quick, and soon to be inevitable, it took awhile for people’s habits and risk tolerance to catch up with the technology.
State lawyer regulatory authorities are similar—at any given time, the Rules of Professional Conduct reflect the state of the world from years ago. (Don’t believe me? Take a look at the advertising rules and tell me they reflect how people do business in 2022.) It takes time for the rules to catch up.
Earlier this week, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced charges in four separate insider trading cases involving nine targets.
Relevant here is the case against Seth Markin (pdf), who is accused of looking through his then-girlfriend’s confidential work documents. The girlfriend, who is not named in the indictment, was an associate at a Washington DC law firm. The couple did not live together, but Markin spent significant time at her one-bedroom apartment, sometimes alone.
Late last week, I wrote about the case of Nathan DeLadurantey, who received a public reprimand for offensive personality involving harassment of a subordinate lawyer.
A reader alerted me to the fact that the decision (which I linked to) appeared to be gone from the Supreme Court Website, and, in fact it is. I checked the court website and learned that as of July 2, the Court withdrew the opinion and will issue a revised one “in due course.” While I have seen courts reconsider or clarify opinions (and they can do so sua sponte) I’ve never seen one withdrawn and removed from the website.
t’s been a busy few weeks for the Supreme Court of Wisconsin—like its federal counterpart, it releases a flurry of opinions before it quiets down for the summer (though unlike its federal counterpart, the Wisconsin Court does not have “Terms”). Although I do have an elections and political law practice, and there were a few opinions on which I have Thoughts, this blog isn’t about that, so I won’t be talking about those kinds of opinions unless there is a professional responsibility overlap.
Today, though, an interesting disciplinary opinion came out.* I am recounting it here not for its subject matter, which is a bit salacious and therefore will likely be the focus of other coverage, but for the overall direction of the process and the opinion.
Can lawyers use a single cell phone (or other device) for both work and personal purposes? Should they?
Unless you’re immersed in the Wisconsin legal world (and aren’t we all?) you may not know that Wisconsin does not permanently disbar lawyers. “Revocation” is the most serious penalty our Rules allow, but no matter how egregious the conduct leading to revocation, the attorney can petition the Supreme Court for reinstatement after five years.
A few days ago, a link to this piece in the State Bar of Wisconsin’s Inside Track caught my eye—“Senior Lawyers: Are We Really Ruining The Profession?” The piece purported to be responding to “Dear Senior Lawyers—You’re Ruining the Profession,” an entry on a law blog out of Queensland, Australia.
I was in California this week for a family funeral, and I was prepared to write this blog entry about all of the grace and understanding colleagues and adversaries have shown. Extensions, offers to cover, and forgiveness for delays were free-flowing. And that’s true, and maybe I will write about that at some point, because this profession is a whole lot less horrible when we can acknowledge each other’s humanity.
No, today I’ll write about that time (today) someone walked off with my laptop at LAX and it did not break my ethics brain.
