Occasionally a lawyer will reach out to me wanting clarification on what should be covered in a letter notifying active clients, whose matters the lawyer will be unable to complete in time, that they are closing their practice. Here’s my response. Ordinarily these letters will inform each client of any relevant time limitations or time [...]
I’ll admit that advertising missteps rarely garner much attention from those who enforce the Rules of Professional Conduct. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise because, truth be told, complaints about what some firm is doing with their advertising campaign almost always come from competitors. Disciplinary complaints filed by consumers of legal services upset with [...]
Guest Blogger Karen Thalacker advocates that sometimes a good, old-fashioned phone call makes the most sense. In the past, attorneys communicated regularly via telephone but that all changed with email. After all, an email can be sent at any time of the day or night and the communication is easy to pass along to your [...]
The ABA’s issuance of Formal Ethics Opinion 482 in September of 2018 finally made it quite clear. Lawyers have an ethical duty to develop a disaster recovery plan. Consider the import of how the Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility concluded their opinion when they stated: “Lawyers must be prepared to deal with disasters. [...]
In this episode of ALPS In Brief, ALPS Risk Manager Mark Bassingthwaighte shares an insightful story of a dream cruise, a freak accident, and an attorney whose casual favor for a friend became a malpractice nightmare. Transcript: Welcome. You're listening to ALPS In Brief. The podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence building [...]
In the Claims world, we love closure letters. Unfortunately, we rarely see them in the files – perhaps that is because attorneys who send closure letters may not be sued as much as those who do not send closure letters! When we use the term, “closure letter” we are referring to a letter that the [...]
Trust, which is built upon a lawyer’s ethical duty to keep all information relating to the representation of a client confidential, is the hallmark of the attorney-client relationship. Think about it. A confidentiality rule makes sense because it’s an excellent way to encourage prospective clients to seek legal assistance when called for and to help [...]
I have been asked to contribute to the ALPS Blog. I am not a blogger. As I tell people who will listen (or read), my first experience with a computer came in my second year of college. That computer was a dot matrix keyboard that you typed out your BASIC, COBAL or FORTRAN computer language [...]
I’ve heard all kinds of crazy comments from lawyers over the years. For example, during a CLE event with a state bar’s ethics counsel sitting next to me on a speaker’s panel, two lawyer attendees tried to convince others in attendance that the panel’s position on conflict of interest resolution was clearly wrong. They stood [...]
This is the second in a series of three blog posts on Law Firms and Data Storytelling. Restating the central premise of this, the prior, and the next post: People look at statistics (data), but they feel, and respond to, stories. Put another way, people tend to make decisions based upon emotion, not logic. So, on to the question raised [...]
