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.
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
If you’re like many lawyers in private practice, you measure (, measure) a year in billable hours, because at the end of the day that’s how you get paid (directly or indirectly, or a combination). I’m not going to use this space to rail for or against the billable hour—most of my work is hourly and there is something to be said for cold math, but plenty of my colleagues utilize contingency, flat fee, and/or hybrid agreements because their work lends itself to those arrangements.
You Really Said That With Your Outside Voice?
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.
Jumping ship? Read this first.
Lawyers leave their firms (voluntarily) and go to others for a variety of reasons—relocation of a spouse, better offers, jerk bosses, bad coffee. And I suspect the worse the current situation (I mean, certain coffee must violate some Geneva Convention provision, right?), the quicker the lawyer may want to say goodbye and move on.
But, not so fast. They’ve got some important ethical obligations.
This is Some Bull, Really
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.
A Little Blogkeeping
So, as this blog keeps going, I’m intending on posting as frequently as I can. Some entries will be quick hits—hey, here’s a new disciplinary opinion, or here’s a lawyer behaving badly—and some will feature links to blogs from my nerd friends* and other respected legal ethics professionals. I hope to have substantive, longer pieces, at least a couple of times a month as well.
There Must Be 50 Ways to Love Your Lawyer
Take her advice, Bryce
Answer your mail, Dale
A Fool for a Client
I often get asked, by lawyers, whether they really need representation when responding to a grievance or other complaint. And even though it’s in my pecuniary interest to reflexively answer, yes, of course you need counsel, the truth is more nuanced.
Difficult Conversations
One of my least favorite parts of law practice is giving bad news to a client. Granted, most of what I have to deliver is along the lines of “we lost the motion and will need to turn over the unredacted documents”—news that may be upsetting or will result in more cost, sure, but nothing earth shattering.
Why Can't We Be Friends?*
There are more than 15,000 lawyers in Wisconsin (5,400 in Milwaukee County alone) and I think we all know each other. Our legal community may seem outsized for the state—possibly thanks to diploma privilege—but it’s really pretty small.
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.