A committee of the District of Columbia Board on Professional Responsibility has recommended disbarment for America’s Mayor/Trump sycophant Rudy Giuliani.
ethicking.com
Thoughts on legal ethics and law practice. Licensed in Wisconsin and Illinois, opinionated everywhere.
Thoughts on legal ethics and law practice. Licensed in Wisconsin and Illinois, opinionated everywhere.
Retire the Kraken!
At least part of the 2020 election is coming to a close, as Lin Wood, once highly regarded for defending Richard Jewell, but now reduced to Kraken (or perhaps Kraken-adjacent) fame, is retiring his law license. He has been mired in disciplinary and sanctions proceedings for many months, and it appears to be coming to an unceremonious end.
Farewell (?) E-banking Trust Account Rules, We Hardly Knew You
Effective today, Wisconsin trust account rules have sort-of caught up with the rest of the country, and finally acknowledge that electronic transactions really aren’t that scary.
Under the Rules applicable from 2016 to yesterday (which the Wisconsin Lawyer optimistically described as “modernizing” the way these things are handled), if lawyers wanted to accept electronic transactions (including credit cards) for advanced fees, they either had to set up a separate “e-banking trust account” or, if they wanted to use a primary trust account for electronic transactions (which has been described as an “all-in-one” trust account) comply with some additional security and insurance needs.
While I Was Out, All of the Sanctions Happened
So I was in DC last week, and, shockingly, offline for most of it. (Supreme Court photo accompanying this blog entry was a “just visiting” picture.)
We’ve missed a few things while I was gone.
Why I Didn't Say "Hi" at the Bar Conference
We in Wisconsin are in the middle of the State Bar Annual Meeting & Conference, right here in Milwaukee. The venue is a couple of blocks from my office so I’ve been and will be popping out.
So far, I’ve seen a few of my clients who I’ve never met in person before—I caught their name tag out of the corner of my eye, or recognized their voice from phone calls. I did not stop and approach them. I waited for them to approach me. If they didn’t, we didn’t talk at all.
Where does AI go from here?
Even though I’m posting this on the Saturday of a three-day-weekend, you’re probably not actually reading this until Tuesday or later. But if you’re as terminally online as I am, you’ve already heard about the lawyer who has used ChatGPT to perhaps accelerate his own obsolescence—allegedly, he used it to generate a whole brief, which was then filed in the Southern District of New York. (The docket and most of the pleadings are available on Court Listener.)
“When did you feel like you really ‘became’ a lawyer?”
This question was posed by the State Bar of Wisconsin on its social media today, and because I am on deadline and should be writing about [things that are my actual work] and instead I am procrastinating, I responded with a small treatise.
But it’s a topic I think is worthy of more exploration, particularly as new graduates get sworn in (thank you diploma privilege) and start working. There will be growing pains. I am 14 years in and although there are no moments where I don’t feel like a lawyer (perhaps to my family’s chagrin), I still occasionally struggle with imposter syndrome (as I think many of us do) and wonder just how I got here.
Talking Honestly About Honesty (When You Can't Really Talk About Government Ethics)
Yesterday, I (and several of my nerd friends, as it would turn out) spoke with Benjamin Penn for an article that ran today in Bloomberg Law about outgoing US Attorney Rachel Rollins, who was found by the Department of Justice’s inspector general to have engaged in wide-ranging violations of government ethics rules. I am not an expert in federal government ethics, far from it, so I stuck to the disciplinary implications of the alleged misconduct.
Relevant here, and to my quote that ran with the Bloomberg story, was that Rollins was found to have falsely testified, under oath, during the investigation of her other conduct (including leaking sensitive information to the press, and potential violations of the Hatch Act). I told Mr. Penn that “Bar regulators, in general, they’ll get their hackles up about any sort of dishonest conduct that has any nexus with the practice of law.”
Crowdfunding, Re-(Re?) Visited
Litigation crowdfunding has recently resurfaced as an issue, as lawyers for Daniel Penny, the man charged with killing Jordan Neely on a New York subway, has have raised nearly $2.5 million dollars (as of this posting) to support his defense fund.
A Belated Update So I Don’t Trigger 8.4(c) By Saying I Blog “Regularly”
The problem with telling the whole world that you blog regularly about legal ethics is that you have to actually do it. And when you’ve got an elections practice in an election month, and you teach dentists, and then you take a spring break trip, and then your kid takes up soccer, and then you end up with a nasty cold, and also you have your actual work, “regularly” becomes aspirational, rather than actual.
So, I am bringing an update of a case I first wrote about in July. The update itself is tardy. So it goes.
Is there really that much daylight between a lawyer and client?
"After completing his time on the Supreme Court, Daniel Kelly provided legal counsel to several clients, amongst which were the RNC and RPW," [Kelly’s spokesman Jim] Dick said (paywalled, sorry). "It is a maxim in the legal profession that the views of clients are not attributable to their attorneys."
But is it really true? Is there really that much distance or difference of opinion between a client and a lawyer?
I Write Other Stuff Too
The March 2023 issue of Wisconsin Lawyer is live (print copies should arrive shortly), so please check out my short article, “When A Professional Needs A Professional.”
When You Solicit An Ethics Nerd, You Best Not Miss
If you’ve talked to me often or long enough, or sat through any recent presentation of mine involving social media, you’ve heard me complain about the state of the attorney advertising and solicitation rules. I’ve been critical rules for some time (though, perhaps, not as vocal on this blog as I have been in the real world).
Part of my frustration is that the Rules are just that outdated. Sure, they’re post-Bates at least; they recognize that attorneys may need to rely on something other than their father’s reputation and their golf club membership to make a living. And, by and large, they try to prevent what I hope we all can agree shouldn’t happen—advertising shouldn’t be false or misleading, and it shouldn’t be coercive.
To The Passenger In Seat 26C
I couldn’t help but notice the passenger one row up and across the aisle from me on my first leg. Her laptop was on and clearly visible. The brightness on the screen was turned up to what seemed like 10000% against the dim nighttime plane lighting. She had papers strewn about her seat area, too.
In a matter of seconds, and without really trying to, I figured out she was a lawyer. Not only that, I learned what specialty she worked in, what her major upcoming deadlines were, her staffing needs for the next few months, and the fact that she was waiting for a particular federal appellate decision to guide her strategy in her case in the lower court. How did I learn this? Bright screen, high contrast, big font.
An Update So Predictable, an AI Could Have Predicted It
Just a few days ago, I wrote about DoNotPay’s offer to allow its robot lawyer take over a Supreme Court argument. A few things have happened in the meantime.
This Blog Title Was Not Written By AI
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.”
Happy New Year, Have A Suspension
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.)
Three Pre-Holiday Short-ish Takes
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).
Selected Thoughts From the Select Committee Summary
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.
Short Takes After a Long Absence
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: