Ethics & Malpractice Issues

I just came across this article  about a Boston-based online gift network called Nift that’s intended to help folks discover other local businesses by giving them a reward, in form of a gift card, to try those businesses out. Here’s a quick summary  of how Nift works in practice: Someone walks into Biyoshi [a local…

Talk about lazy blogging.  I happened to come across this March 2015 post  at Findlaw’s Law Firm Business Blog  recommending that law firms consider setting up an informational booth or table at the outdoor festivals, fairs and farmers’ markets that propagate in communities across the country throughout the spring and summer months. The article goes…

Updated September 6, 2022 Note: Since this post was originally published, some states have FINALLY revised their ethics rules to allow more flexibility to deposit an advance payment of flat fees to an operating account.  Take a look at this recent roundup.  Nevertheless, cases like this one are useful in giving insight into regulators’ concerns…

Client trust accounts are intended to safeguard clients’ property – whether it takes the form of a million-dollar settlement award that needs to allocated before distribution to the client, or a $5000 advance retainer fee that hasn’t yet been earned.  But as a result of a recent North Carolina ethics opinion, 2015 FEO 6,  clients…

If one were to ask New Jersey’s ethics regulators the popular native question, what exit?, the response would be ”the one that lets out at the turn of the century. The twentieth century, that is.  Because what I can tell from the various New Jersey ethics advisory committees, regulators have their eyes planted firmly on…

Yesterday, I sat for a demo of an online document-sharing platform that hadn’t impressed me much when I tested it two years ago after its initial launch. Still, because I’ve impatiently ditched many products in beta, only to learn of significant upgrades a year later, I agreed to take a second look. While the product…

Unlike solos and smalls who live under the microscope when it comes to ethics regulation for advertising, big law attorneys had no such problems. After all, until ten or fifteen years ago, most big law attorneys didn’t do much more than list in a lawyer directory like   Martindale Hubbell or post a bio on…