A recently released Florida Bar advisory opinion on search engine optimization for lawyers’ websites can be found here: http://www.legalethicsforum.com/blog/2013/03/florida-bar-addresses-website-optimization.html
And the Lawyerist offers great guidance for attorneys about search engine optimization, lawyers’ reputations, and legal ethics here: http://lawyerist.com/seo-for-lawyers-your-reputation-and-legal-ethics/
An interesting article by Jan Jacobowitz. Available here.
By Laurel Terry
On March 25, 2013, the Law Society of England and Wales issued a statement that joint representation of the buyer and the lender in a property sales transaction is acceptable and provides the best value for money for clients. See http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/society-sticks-joint-representation-homebuyers#comments . (For more background, see http://www.lawsociety.org.uk/advice/articles/separate-representation/. ) In taking this position, the Law Society explicitly rejected the position taken the previous week by the Law Society of Scotland, noting that the “regulatory environment and market conditions are very different in Scotland.”
On March 22, 2013, the Law Society of Scotland had voted 58-27 to remove the current exception to the conflict of interest rules that permits a single solicitor to carry out work both for a client wishing to buy a property and their mortgage lender. To become effective, the revised practice rules will have to be approved by the members of the Law Society of Scotland at a special general meeting to be held in September 2013 and approved by the lord president. See http://www.lawscot.org.uk/news/press-releases/2013/march-/news22313agmseprep; http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/separate-representation-vote-condemned. These two UK decisions, which come out with different results, can provide the basis for a useful discussion in Chapter 5 related to Conflicts of Interest.
You might also find it useful to show the students the buyer-seller conflict decision tree and buyer-lender conflict decision tree. See http://www.lawsociety.org.uk/advice/documents/conflicts-of-interest—buyer-and-seller/ and http://www.lawsociety.org.uk/advice/documents/conflicts-of-interest—lender-and-borrower/ .
The AALS Section on Professional Responsibility invites papers for its 2014 Annual Meeting program, “The Lost Lawyer and the Lawyer-Statesman Ideal: A Generation Later – The Shifting Sands of the Profession’s Identity.”
More information is available here: AALS SECTION ON PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY.
The Stein Center for Law and Ethics and the Corporate Law Center co-sponsored a three-part series called The Business and Ethics of Managing a 21st Century Law Firm. The concluding panel took place on Monday, March 18th and it was titled “The Impact of Technology on the Future of Law Firms.”
The final panel focused on the many kinds of technology influencing the way today’s law firm does business and the ethical questions this technology raises. Panelists shared their views on virtual law firm business models, as well as on tools like e-discovery, data mining, quantitative methods for lawyers and the need for law firms to adopt technological tools in their day-to-day business models.
Panelists included: Dr. Silvia Hodges, Adjunct Professor at Fordham Law School and Director of Research Services at TyMetrix Legal Analytics; Daniel Martin Katz, Assistant Professor of Law & Co-Director of ReInvent Law: A Law Laboratory Devoted to Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship at Michigan State University College of Law; Larry W. Bridgesmith, Chief Relationship Officer, ERM Legal Solutions LLC; and Suzie Scanlon, Professional, Berger Legal LLC. Suzie Scanlon is a Fordham Law graduate from 1995. The event was moderated by Ron Lazebnik, teacher of the Samuelson-Glushko Intellectual Property and Information Law Clinic at Fordham Law School.
Please see the links below for more information
DLA Piper has sued executive Adam H. Victor to recover fees and he has in turn counter-sued for overbilling. The New York Times discusses embarrassing DLA Piper emails that have been discovered during the litigation.
See Suit Offers a Peek at the Practice of Inflating a Legal Bill
and DLA Piper Calls E-Mails Cited in Lawsuit An “Offensive” Attempt at Humor.
OTHERWISE: Anthony Lewis, Who Transformed Coverage of the Supreme Court, Dies at 85 – NYTimes.com.
Fifty years ago the United States Supreme Court announced in Gideon v. Wainwright that the Sixth Amendment right to the assistance of counsel is so essential to a fair trial that government must provide a lawyer to a defendant who cannot afford one.
No one did more to celebrate the importance of the decision than did Times Supreme Court reporter and columnist Anthony Lewis, who died yesterday.
Though lawyers declared their obligation to serve the public, volunteerism and court assignments were a travesty of justice for criminal defendants. `Gideon’s Trmpet’, as Lewis called it, was a clarion call to make the promise of the 6th Amendment a genuine commitment, however incomplete may be the response so far.
On the subject of judicial ethics: A group of legal ethics professors and five law school ethics centers (including Fordham’s Stein Center) filed an amicus brief in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case, United States v. Davila. In that case, a federal magistrate judge encouraged a criminal defendant to plead guilty and cooperate with the government, thereby violating Fed. R. Crim. P. 11, principles of judicial ethics and standards set in past judicial decisions. The federal court of appeals overturned the defendant’s guilty plea even though the defendant never objected to the magistrate judge’s exhortation. The ethicists’ brief argues that, to promote judicial integrity as well as the defendant’s fair process rights, the court of appeals acted within its supervisory authority in vacating the guilty plea without an inquiry into whether the particular defendant’s decision to plead guilty was influenced by the magistrate judge’s coercive conduct.
Widener Law School must defend consumer fraud act claims William Walls, Senior U.S. District Judge has denied a motion to dismiss, saying that plaintiffs – Widener Law School grads – have asserted a plausible claim of misrepresentation by the school in its statements regarding employment obtained by its law school graduates.
A number of recent entrants to the legal services market are taking on what I see as a new sort of role beyond that of trusted advisor—the lawyer as trusted curator. In an era of information overload, this seems to be an important role for an attorney. While the Model Rules of Professional Conduct don’t use my terminology of ‘trusted curator,’ I think this is what the Preamble is getting at where it states that “a lawyer should cultivate knowledge of the law beyond its use for clients, employ that knowledge in reform of the law and work to strengthen legal education. In addition, a lawyer should further the public’s understanding of and confidence in the rule of law and the justice system.” And it seems to me that more lawyers can and should be acting as curators, both to educate the public and also as a way to develop their own client base. At the end of this post, you’ll find a few examples I’ve studied as part of a current research project.
Here is my question: When a lawyer acts as a ‘trusted curator’ of information about the law, does this trigger any special professional responsibilities?
To be sure, curating legal services is not the same as providing personalized legal advice to a client. Yet, there are a number of parallels. Users who encounter the curated experience may place an implicit trust in the lawyer’s culling together of relevant information, largely based upon the lawyer’s perceived expertise. The inclusion of some information and the exclusion of other information might motivate the user to act (or not act) in a particular way. Well-curated information may very well lead a user to seek out the curator for individually-tailored legal advice. In this way, curating is similar to advertising or marketing, as well as a form of education.
Much like the curator of an exhibit in a museum, these legal services providers combine law with art, design, technology, gamification, humor, and news from other fields to provide a rich user experience. (For more on using design, tech, and games to illuminate law, see Margaret Hagan’s new Open Law Lab – the website is worth a visit just to check out her incredible artistic interpretations of law.) While each of the examples I list below takes a slightly different approach, all offer at least a portion of their curated information for free, letting users establish some form of relationship before taking it to the level of becoming a client.
I see enormous potential for lawyers as trusted curators to help with the access-to-information-gap that perpetuates the access-to-justice-gap in this country. Most of the public does not even recognize a legal problem when presented with it. Even if we succeed in providing more affordable, accessible services through technology and other efficiencies, the justice gap will remain unless individuals in need actually adopt the services. Curating legal information in user-friendly, understandable ways could go a long way toward filling this gap.
And here’s the list I promised above — a few examples of lawyers (and nonlawyers!) and legal service providers offering curated experiences in the US and the UK:
(Disclaimer, I’m an advisor to LegalForce and Velawsity.)
(Cross-posted at the Legal Ethics Forum)
OTHERWISE: Father of cop cannot hear police cases – NJ Supreme Court. A municipal judge whose son serves in the City’s police force cannot hear any cases with police witnesses, the New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled, citing Canon 2’s appearance of impropriety standard.
For those of you who won’t be joining us at ReInvent Law Silicon Valley this coming week, I’ll try to do some posting on the topics that might be most interesting to LEF readers. One talk by Richard Granat of DirectLaw gets to the heart of Model Rule 5.4 and the recent announcements about private investment in legal service providers (see, e.g., Axiom Scores $28 Million Round of Funding).
Here is Richard’s description of his talk, Private Investment in US Legal Services–New Business Models:
I am interested in how to get private capital into law firms, given the restrictions of ABA Professional Rule 5.4 which prohibits non-lawyers from taking an equity interest in a law firm. Are there ways of getting around this rule? What kind of law firm structures can be created that enable private equity investment? Is it wise to enable private investment in law firms? Will it ever happen in the United States given the present position of the ABA and state bar associations? What can small and medium size law firms do to access capital to make them more competitive? Are Clearspire and AxiomLaw ethically compliant models that can be replicated?
Richard previews more of the ReInvent Law Silicon Valley talks at his eLawyering Blog.
The complete line up of our 40+ speakers for ReInvent Law Silicon Valley is here.
(Originally posted at the Legal Ethics Forum.)
Emergency VA Lawyer Assistance. New Jersey Law Journal Editorial Board
A recent report of the General Accountability Office (No. 13-89, Jan. 18) about the handling of veterans’ disability and pension claims by the Department of Veterans Affairs is an eye-opener.
The starting point is a bleak comparison: Although the VA completed processing of 1 million claims for benefits in fiscal 2012, a 9 percent annual increase over 2009, the number of claims filed between 2009 and 2012 increased by 29 percent. As a consequence, as of August 2012 there were more than 850,000 pending claims, with 66 percent of them deemed backlogged. Although the VA’s target in 2011 was for an average processing period of 132 days, the current average is about 260 days.
Budget cuts, deterring increased staffing, have exacerbated the problem. To help reduce the backlog, the VA has employed new technology and innovations, such as paperless record-keeping and simplified terms and forms. Resources have been shifted from appeals to processing initial claims, and private contractors have been hired. Veterans are offered assistance by VA personnel and volunteer groups in filling out applications and obtaining required information.
Even so, the problems are mind-numbing. For example, relevant medical records are not fully computerized, and the high number of reservists and National Guard personnel serving in the war zone, on multiple tours, means that more VA claimants must rely on reserve and National Guard record-keeping systems, often handwritten only, that are not linked to or fully compatible with Department of Defense (and thus VA) medical and related computer records. Nor are Social Security Administration record systems fully compatible.
It gets worse. To improve claims processing, VA employees have been shifted from appeals to claims processing. That means fewer people available to analyze an applicant’s notice of disagreement with the initial claims decision (the first step toward appealing an adverse initial determination) and an appeals process that has slowed to a crawl. VA targets no more than seven days to enter a notice of disagreement into the system. Now the average is a staggering 43 days. The average time to process the notice is 390 days, and it takes a total of 580 days, on average, for an appeal to be certified.
Thankfully, lawyers in New Jersey and elsewhere have lent their assistance. Pro bono counsel are offered through the N.J. State Bar Association and the N.J. Department of Military Affairs. Veterans service organizations at regional VA offices also assist applicants in filling out the forms and marshaling the requisite medical and service information. The National Veterans Legal Services Program and its Lawyers Serving Warriors project offers pro bono services of lawyers at a number of national law firms and in-house legal departments. Lawyers now are allowed to assist or appear, on a fee basis, at some stages of the process.
Professional Responsibility: A Contemporary Approach 