At risk of this blog turning into a Wisconsin Lawyer repository (as original-to-the-bog content has been…well, mostly missing), I present for your consideration “Ethics Song ‘89,” my latest contribution to the State Bar journal.
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.
All in Personal
When You're a Hammer, Everything is a Nail; When You're an Ethics Nerd Everything Is A Material Limitation Conflict
Hi, folks,
It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?
Sorry to say, it’s going to be awhile yet, as things are busy here.
In the meantime, my January column for the Wisconsin Lawyer is out; this time, I discuss all those little conflicts life deals.
And Now We Are Four
Today is October 24, which means this blog is celebrating its fourth birthday. It should be able to walk downstairs, know the difference between reality and fantasy, and ask a lot of questions.
Wisconsin Lawyer: Now Featuring Bonus Ethicking
Check out my debut as an ethics columnist in the Wisconsin Lawyer. I’ll be writing in every other issue, and the editor is letting me snark there too. I’m just not allowed to write about politics, though I was able to sneak in a Kanye 2020 reference.
Greetings from Denver
It’s early August, which means I am at the APRL Annual Meeting hanging with my nerd friends and learning about collateral estoppel, generative AI, and interstate practice, and other important topics in legal ethics and disciplinary defense.
“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.
Wherein The Cobbler's Children Actually Have Shoes For Once
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.
Put a Question Out to the Universe and the Universe Responds
The folks at the Monroe H. Freedman Institute for Legal Ethics at Hofstra University’s Deane School of Law have invited me and a fantastic panel of others—including Michael Teter, the 65 Project’s executive director—to have that conversation at a Zoom event, “Holding Trump’s Lawyers Accountable.”
Pardon the Light Blogging
Greetings to all of you new people who visited me through the Legal Talk Today podcast (give it a listen here) or through my interview with the State Bar of Wisconsin’s Inside Track (watch here). And, sorry all of that new content that Inside Track seemed to suggest happened on a regular basis did not actually happen.
...speaking of Rudy
I recently recorded a podcast for Legal Talk Today, and discussed Rudy Giuliani’s future and the limits of zealous advocacy. (Loyal readers will recognize some of this.)
Happy Blogoversary to Me!
That’s right, if you can believe it, Ethicking.com launched one year ago, on October 24, 2019.
…so, what a year, huh?
Like anyone who set out to do anything a year ago, this did not go as I’d planned. Sure, I did manage to keep up with the blog generally, updating every couple of weeks or so (and sometimes more often, though not quite at the weekly frequency I’d hoped). I thought I’d be writing about ABA opinions, nerd friends, and best practices, and I did that. And, sadly, I knew at this time last year, barring some very rapid advancement in medical science (or, as he called it, “a meteor crashing to Earth with the cure”) I would be posting a eulogy for my dear friend and mentor at some point.
On Lawyering, And Snark Blogging, When The World Is On Fire
I have been derelict in updating this blog most of this summer, despite the promise to myself that I’d have fresh and exciting new content every 10-14 days and quick hits in between. Of course, when I made that promise to myself it was October 2019.
And I do have a bunch of half-written entries and prompts floating around, ranging from a February piece-in progress on the illusion of work-life balance (which, to be fair is still an illusion now, except I’m not writing about those weird feet-on-the-beach pictures or Bar events anymore) to three lines in an entry titled: “So It’s Come To This: The Ethics of Using Mail in 2020.” But it’s been hard to see things to completion and publication.
That’s because everything is hard, and it’s been hard.
It's Not Just Stress: Talking About Vicarious Trauma
I learned later that I was probably suffering from vicarious (or secondary) trauma, which is the subject of a recent ABA Journal article (and other good ones in the past). To summarize briefly, lawyers can be surrounded by their clients’ traumas and sometimes internalize them, to the point where they exhibit symptoms similar to those of PTSD.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
I wrote this about nine years ago. My first real lawyer job started as a 2L clerkship and ended after only a year, as the Great Recession was showing its teeth. I had just started my second job out of law school, and felt pretty confident, even though I was branching into some new areas of law and working in a wholly new environment.
So, why Ethicking?
It started off, as many things do, as a bit of a joke. A couple of years ago, I checked in on social media to the State Bar Center in Madison, where I was about to give a talk about the ethics of dealing with emotionally charged situations, and I posed that question. And my Facebook friends answered, even though I had (sort of) intended my post to be rhetorical.