Ethics & Malpractice Issues

Starting a law firm can be hard. But once you’ve got the infrastructure in place, there’s no reason that you can’t launch other side ventures. That’s the subject of this article Solo/Small Law Plus , highlighting lawyers with side “hustles” (as we’ve referred to it on Solosez) and offering a couple of thoughts on how…

The following is a guest post by Roy Ginsburg. In the famous 1977 Bates decision, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that lawyers have First Amendment rights, too; legal advertising is constitutionally protected commercial speech.  Prior to that, state’s ethics rules prohibited all advertising — and we never saw any of those amusing (and not so…

This morning, I posted about DLAPiper’s $200k minimum annual billing cover charge for clients. But after a couple of conversations, I’ve gotten to wondering how DLAPiper can enforce this minimum charge without running afoul of ethics requirements. For example, what happens if DLAPiper estimates that defending Company X in a major lawsuit will cost $250,000,…

I’ve been so busy covering the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 initiatives on ethics of lawyer use of social media for marketing and confidentiality concerns regarding lawyer use of technology that I just about overlooked the other initiatives that continue to emerge. For example, on December 2, 2010, the ABA’s released an issues paper on…

Well, I was an hour or two late, but I got my comments in on the ABA Issues papers on web use and cloud computing. You can read them below. ABA Comments

What’s not to like about an online client portal?  Setting up a site that enables clients to access their records or check the status of their case 24/7 offers the benefit of convenience and saves costs by eliminating the need for staff to respond to client requests for information. Client portals aren’t pricey either.  Technologies…

For the past few months, I’ve been tracking the activity of the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 . Created in 2009, the Commission has been tasked to review the Model Rules of Professional Responsibility and the U.S. system of lawyer regulation in the context of advances in technology and global legal practice developments, and recommend…

Over at the Avvo Blog, general counsel Josh King shares the American Medical Association‘s just released Policy on Professionalism in the Use of Social Media — all 358 words of it.   Josh applauds the AMA Policy for both its brevity and: tacit acknowledgment that physicians are professionals – professionals who may need some guidance…