In my summer asynchronous PR course @WFULawSchool, I had my students include a PR question they have as part of their intro discussion post. It’s always interesting to see what students are thinking about with respect to PR, before class starts. I put them together in a video for the students and talked through each one – here they are! (with edits and all identifying info deleted)
Call for Papers
AALS Section on Professional Responsibility
The Ethics of Legal Education
2018 AALS Annual Meeting
San Diego, CA
January 3-6, 2018
The Section on Professional Responsibility is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for the Section’s 2018 Program: The Ethics of Legal Education. In addition to featuring invited speakers (Professor Joan Howarth, Dean Andrew Perlman, and Dean Daniel Rodriguez), we will select up to two speakers from this call.
This panel will explore the ethical challenges U.S. law schools have faced during the past decade and will consider the path ahead. Speakers will address various subjects that may include: alternative and accelerated degree programs, for-profit law schools, accreditation decisions, admissions and scholarship practices, employment issues, and litigation filed by students and alumni against law schools. The panel will explore the factors that have influenced ethical and values-based decision-making, leadership challenges, and how law school leaders’ ethics and values in this area may influence the future of the legal education and the legal profession.
Participants need not write a paper, but will have the option to publish a paper if they choose to do so.
Any member of the full-time faculty of an AALS member school may submit a 500-1500 word proposal by August 15, 2017 to Renee Knake at rknake@central.uh.edu. The title of the email submission should read: Submission – 2018 AALS Section on Professional Responsibility.
The Planning Committee for the Annual Meeting of the Section on Professional Responsibility will review all submissions and select up to two papers by September 1, 2017. Please note that all faculty members presenting at the program are responsible for paying their own annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses.
Any questions should be directed to 2018 Program Co-chairs Renee Knake at rknake@central.uh.edu or Paula Schaefer at paula.schaefer@tennessee.edu.
For those of you following the Dewey & LeBoeuf criminal trial, you know that the jury deadlocked in October 2015 after nearly six months of deliberations on dozens of charges against Steven H. Davis, the former chairman of Dewey, and two other former executives of the law firm, Stephen DiCarmine and Joel Sanders. The three men were accused of being the architects of an accounting fraud that enabled Dewey to defraud its lenders and creditors during much of the financial crisis.
In January and February 2016, Manhattan Prosecutors reached deferred prosecution agreements with Steven H. Davis and Zachary Warren, one of the original defendants.
The Manhattan prosecutors retried the case against DiCarmine and Sanders, the remaining defendants, in the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. In May 2017, the jury delivered a split verdict. Joel Sanders, the law firm’s former chief financial officer, was convicted on three criminal counts. He could be sentenced up to four years in prison. Stephen DiCarmine, the former executive director, was acquitted of the same charges.
Update on the case can be found here.
Last month, NC adopted 2017 FEO 1, finding:
(1) that lawyers may use subscriber based text services to send texts with links to the lawyers website; and
(2) it is not a violation of 7.3(a) if the subscriber has the option to reply to the text message as follows:
The committee also confirmed that it is not a violation of 7.3(a) if the second text message from includes the lawyer’s phone number and an invitation to call the lawyer.
Did Jeff Sessions violate Rule 1.11 if he participated in the decision to fire Jim Comey? The Rule 1.11 issue depends on whether the firing implicated Comey’s investigation of the Russian connection to the Trump campaign. If so, does Sessions’s participation in the campaign and/or personal contacts with the Russians require him to withdraw under Rule 1.11? See, for example, this column on Sessions and the Comey firing.
Yesterday, the ABA issued a formal opinion on attorney email encryption, providing that while encryption is not required always, it may be – and to determine if it is, a lawyer must understand certain things, including how information is transmitted and where it is stored.
Great summary of (and link to) the opinion here.
H/T to Jim Calloway @ Law Practice Tips.
Professional Responsibility: A Contemporary Approach 