By Charles Berwanger
The reader is asked to picture a fictional settlement conference of a lawsuit. Present is the client representative, defendant Ajax Corporation’s General Counsel, and Ajax’s Defense Counsel. They are in a breakout room while the mediator talks with Plaintiff’s Counsel and plaintiff in another breakout room.
By Katie Parker
As noted in a recent Ethics in Brief column (here), an attorney’s persistent lack of civility can have concrete financial consequences. In the case at issue there, the California Court of Appeal affirmed the trial court’s reliance on lack of civility in reducing an attorney’s fee award. The Court observed that plaintiff’s counsel’s “beratement of opposing counsel and belittling of the trial court were unnecessary to advocate zealously” on his client’s behalf. Snoeck v. ExakTime Innovations, Inc., 96 Cal. App. 5th 908, 925 (2023).
By Valerie Silverman Massey
Scenario: As a senior or supervising attorney, you are preparing to file a document with a court. A more junior attorney prepares the document using prior office writings/research or conducting new research and preparing the document from scratch. Your name is on the caption and the signature line.
By Edward McIntyre
Macbeth turned to Sara and Duncan “Pete Moore, a friend, and my go-to AI guru, asked if we could meet. Said it was urgent. I told him to come right over. Are you both free for a few minutes?”
As judges around the country weigh how to hold accountable the lawyers who abused the courts to advance former President Trump’s frivolous challenges to the 2020 election, two recent cases are particularly instructive for attorneys who wish to comply with their ethical responsibilities. These cases also present a good opportunity to review various State Bar Act provisions and the California Rules of Profession Conduct [CRPC] that are potentially implicated by these recent developments.
A potential client comes to a lawyer with a case against his or her former employer. The catch: the lawyer worked for the same company before passing the bar.
By Edward McIntyre
A recent State Bar Court discipline opinion underscores that we, lawyers, should take a court’s order seriously — very seriously — at our peril.[1] The facts of the case drive the point.
By Gary W. Schons
You are a young prosecutor preparing for your first domestic violence trial. Fortunately it’s “only” a misdemeanor charge—domestic battery—Penal Code § 243 (c)(1)—because the injuries to your victim, a young single mother of 2 small girls who was assaulted by the children’s father, were not serious, some minor contusions to the face where the defendant struck her.
By Andrew A. Servais
As most know, on November 1, 2018, 69 new California Rules of Professional Conduct replaced 46 current Rules of Professional Conduct in an effort to bring the California Rules in closer alignment with ABA Model Rules.
By David C. Carr
The California Rules of Professional Conduct (Rules) are intended to provide standards for the imposition of professional discipline on lawyers in California (Rule 1.0.1.) But in practice the Rules are applied in other contexts, such as legal malpractice, fee disputes and disqualification of counsel in court, a reality acknowledged by Comment 1 to Rule 1.0.1:
