LER No. 33 - $11M Loss in Romance Conflict, Lying Witnesses, No Parties for Judges, AI Sanctions (Again), Ethics Trivia, Women's History, Jobs, Events & More (03.11.24)
The Legal Ethics Roundup - your Monday morning tour of all things related to lawyer and judicial ethics with University of Houston law professor Renee Knake Jefferson
Welcome
Thank you for being here. Welcome to what captivates, haunts, inspires, and surprises me every week in the world of legal ethics.
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Last July I was invited by the Women's Rights National Historical Park to speak at their celebration honoring the 175th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention where the Declaration of Sentiments was adopted in 1848.
While many of the sixteen “grievances” contained in that document have been achieved—for example women can now own property and join in higher education—a disturbing number endure today, a point I made in my talk which you can listen to here.
Only eight of our more than 400 National Parks are devoted to women’s history. The Seneca Falls site includes the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel where the 1848 convention occurred, along with a museum and bookstore. It’s worth a visit.
Highlights from Last Week - Top Ten Headlines
#1 Potential Conflict in Dual Roles Leading University and Serving as Lawyer? From the Harvard Crimson: “Former Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow William F. Lee ’72 is facing two ethics complaints alleging his dual roles at Harvard and law firm WilmerHale created a conflict of interest, the New York Post reported Thursday. The complaints, which were filed with the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers and the state attorney general’s office, alleged Lee’s role leading the Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — meant he oversaw the University officials who manage relationships with external law firms.” Legal ethics experts Nancy Moore (Boston University) and Stephen Gillers (NYU) say no conflict. Read more here.
#2 Sanctions for Silence While Witnesses Lied? From the Daily Beast: “Now that former Trump Organization accountant Allen Weisselberg has pleaded guilty to perjury, the lawyers who defended Donald Trump at his bank fraud trial have found themselves in a precarious position: open to accusations that they violated professional ethics for remaining silent while their witness lied in court.” As legal ethics expert Bruce Green (Fordham) notes: “It's exceedingly rare for the lawyer to actually know that what the client or witness said under oath was a lie.” Read more here.
#3 Board of Ethics Meeting Canceled for Fani Willis. From Newsweek: “Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was saved from public scrutiny at the last minute after a Board of Ethics meeting was canceled the morning of the scheduled event. Thursday's special meeting was initially scheduled to hear two complaints brought against Willis.” Read more here.
#4 No Law Firm Parties for Judges. From the State Bar of Michigan: “Judicial officers should decline to attend law firm-sponsored events with limited exceptions, according to a new ethics opinion from the State Bar of Michigan’s Standing Committee on Judicial Ethics. … The opinion analyzes Canon 2, which deals with the appearance of impropriety, and Canon 4, which outlines allowable extrajudicial activities, as to why judges should not attend events at law firms.” Read more here. Sound familiar? LER readers may recall that California issued a similar opinion last August. (Revisit Roundup No. 6, Headline #6 for more on that.)
#5 Jackson Walker May Lose All Fees from Bankruptcy Romance Conflict. From the Texas Lawbook: “Jackson Walker violated lawyer disciplinary and federal bankruptcy disclosure rules when it failed to disclose the romantic relationship between one of its lawyers and the judge in several high-profile bankruptcies, and the firm should be sanctioned and required to return more than $11 million it was paid in those cases, according to the U.S. trustee for the Southern District of Texas. In a new court filing last week, U.S. Trustee Kevin Epstein wrote that ‘denial of all compensation is warranted because of Jackson Walker’s failures to disclose’ the relationship between its then-partner and later former partner Elizabeth Freeman and U.S. Bankruptcy Judge David Jones during several major bankruptcy cases.” Read more here.
#6 More Sanctions for AI Fake Citations. From Law360: “A Massachusetts judge has put the state's legal bar on notice of the dangers of trusting artificial intelligence by sanctioning an attorney $2,000 for filing court papers that were full of realistic-sounding but fictitious case citations.” Read more here.
#7 Lawyer for Alex Jones Seeks Withdrawal. From Reuters: “The lawyer responsible for guiding Alex Jones' media company through bankruptcy will ask a judge for permission to drop out of the case at a court hearing next week, saying he has irreparable disagreements with the company's management. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston, Texas, said on Friday that he would convene an emergency hearing on March 11 to consider a request by Ray Battaglia, who has been lead bankruptcy counsel for Infowars' parent company Free Speech Systems since 2022 after Battaglia said his relationship with the company's chief restructuring officer, Patrick Magill is ‘fundamentally broken.’" Read more here.
#8 Reforms for NC Bar Grievance Process. From Law360: “The North Carolina State Bar’s grievance process could soon be revamped to include new standing requirements and open-file discover for the accused under a slate of proposals proffered Monday by a group of lawyers and judges on the State Bar Review Committee.” Read more here.
#9 Cuts to Third-Party Litigation Lending? From JD Supra: “A new decision may cut back on attempts by third-party litigation lenders to control settlements.” Read more here.
#10 Comparative Perspective — UK Lawyers Should “Call Out” Bad Behavior. From Legal Futures: “Both a sub-postmaster victim of the Post Office scandal and the chief executive of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) have urged lawyers to call out colleagues’ improper behaviour. Lee Castleton, whose story was one of those featured in ITV’s drama, Mr. Bates vs The Post Office, told lawyers in the audience of a Legal Services Board conference yesterday that ‘you are all regulators.’ He explained: ‘Every one of you can call anyone out. If somebody in your practice or coworker or whomever is doing something that they shouldn’t be doing, call them out. Tell them. You’re all able to do that. It shouldn’t be that you need a regulator to tell you what is right and what isn’t right. You are all human beings.’ SRA chief executive Paul Philip agreed that ‘each and every lawyer has a role in self-regulation.’” Read more here.
This Week in (Women’s!) Ethics History
March 3, 1970. (Ok, technically last week’s history…but I missed it!) Linda Coffee filed two cases that would go on to be consolidated as Roe v. Wade in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Sarah Weddington soon joined her as named counsel in the case, eventually arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court. She graduated from law school at the University of Texas only four years before. Among her other accomplishments, Weddington was the only woman involved in the drafting of the precursor to what is now the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. (She wasn’t permitted to be an official member of the committee, however. That honor was reserved to a small group of white men. See Roundup No. 26 for more on that.)
March 12, 1993. The first woman to serve as the U.S. Attorney General, Janet Reno, was sworn in.
March 15, 1933. The notorious Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the nation’s second female Supreme Court justice, was born.
Recommended Reading — Recent Scholarship
Continuing on from last week’s theme focusing on AI for lawyers and judges, this week features a piece from Margaret Hagan (Stanford), “Good AI Legal Help, Bad AI Legal Help: Establishing Quality Standards for Responses to People’s Legal Problem Stories,” JURIX 2023: 36th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, AI and Access to Justice Workshop. From the abstract:
Much has been made of generative AI models’ ability to perform legal tasks or pass legal exams, but a more important question for public policy is whether AI platforms can help the millions of people who are in need of legal help around their housing, family, domestic violence, debt, criminal records, and other important problems. When a person comes to a well-known, general generative AI platform to ask about their legal problem, what is the quality of the platform’s response? Measuring quality is difficult in the legal domain, because there are few standardized sets of rubrics to judge things like the quality of a professional’s response to a person’s request for advice. This study presents a proposed set of 22 specific criteria to evaluate the quality of a system’s answers to a person’s request for legal help for a civil justice problem. It also presents the review of these evaluation criteria by legal domain experts like legal aid lawyers, courthouse self help center staff, and legal help website administrators. The result is a set of standards, context, and proposals that technologists and policymakers can use to evaluate the quality of this specific legal help task in future benchmark efforts.
Legal Ethics Trivia
From the Texas Center for Legal Ethics, here’s the question of the month: “What happens when the judge calls?” Test yourself at this website where you can read a short hypothetical, select an answer, and see your results. So far, only 50% have gotten it right. Will you?
Get Hired
Did you miss the 100+ job postings from previous weeks? Find them all here.
Associate General Counsel (Ethics Officer), Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority — Arlington/Hybrid. Interprets and applies the Airports Authority’s Codes of Ethics for the Board of Directors and employees; advises directors and employees about the application of the Codes of Ethics. Provides ethics training for directors and employees. Receives and investigates allegations of violations of the Codes of Ethics; serves as primary support staff to the Board of Director’s Ethics Review Committee; and recommends revisions to the Codes of Ethics. Learn more here.
Attorney, Louisiana Board of Ethics — Baton Rouge. Attend Board of Ethics meetings and, with the supervision of a higher-level attorney, present requests for advisory opinions and staff reports; render advice as to the interpretation and application of the Code of Governmental Ethics, Campaign Finance Disclosure Act, Lobbyist Disclosure Acts, and conflict of interest provisions of the gaming laws. Prepare opinions based on Board of Ethics rulings, draft letter opinions, resolutions, letters of charges, and general correspondence. Learn more here.
Conflicts Attorney, Robinson + Cole — Remote. Review and clear conflicts related to all client/matter intake requests as well as day-to-day conflict search requests, which requires in-depth understanding of the firm’s new business intake process, conflicts database, and client/matter data. Learn more here.
Upcoming Ethics Events & Other Announcements
Did you miss an announcement from previous weeks? Find them all here.
March 15 — Symposium on Ethics in the Judiciary and the Legal Profession: Are We in Crisis? Cardozo Law School is hosting this in-person event, which starts at 9AM and is open to the public. Full disclosure—I’m one of the invited speakers. Other speakers include: Melissa Murray (NYU), Richard Painter (Minnesota), James Sample (Hofstra), Sung Hui Kim (UCLA), Rebecca Roiphe (New York Law), W. Bradley Wendel (Cornell), Ian Ayres (Yale), Deborah Pearlstein (Princeton), and Daniel Richman (Columbia). Register here for FREE in-person or online attendance, CLE credit available. More information here.
March 26 — Jeffrey Clark Disbarment Hearing. This trial will be live-streamed on YouTube, and is scheduled for March 26-29 and April 1-5.
March 27 — “Taylor Swift is a Genius. Even About Legal Ethics.” Tennessee Bar Association. From the program description: “Everyone knows that Taylor Swift is a music genius. But she’s made some pretty smart moves in the courtroom too. Join the CLE Performer, Stuart Teicher, Esq., as he talks about how the ethics rules are invoked in some of Taylor Swift’s run ins with the legal system.” Learn more and register at this link. (Not a Swiftie? Check out his archived webinar on legal writing “From Bach to Beyonce” here)
April 4 — Book Talk on Access to Justice and Ethics, NYU Law School Center for Race, Inequality and the Law, 6:30-7:30PM. This event brings together my book Law Democratized: A Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis in conversation with three others about access to justice and ethics, including Ray Brescia (Albany) Lawyer Nation: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Legal Profession; Sateesh Nori (NYU) Sheltered: Twenty Years in Housing Court; and Jane M. Spinak (Columbia) The End of Family Court: How Abolishing the Court Brings Justice to Children and Families.
April 10 – The Role of the Legal Profession in a Time of Crisis, co-hosted by the Freedman Institute for the Study of Legal Ethics at Hofstra Law School and the Stein Center for Law and Ethics at Fordham Law. This is the second session in a two-part series featuring Ray Brescia’s book Lawyer Nation: The Past, Present, and Future of the American Legal Profession in conversation with my book Law Democratized: A Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis. Event is 6:10-8PM on Zoom. Register here. And get 30% off plus free shipping if you order both books from NYU Press – use discount code NYUP30. Speakers include Bruce Green (Fordham), Harold Koh (Yale), Becky Roiphe (NYLS), and Steve Younger (Nixon Peabody) for April 10.
April 19-20 — Workshop on Professional Identity Formation in the Professional Responsibility Course at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, Minneapolis. The Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions, in conjunction with casebook publishers, is sponsoring a workshop on incorporating professional identity formation into professional responsibility courses, including how professors primarily focused on preparing students for the MPRE can still easily incorporate professional identity into their teaching. I’ll be there, along with other casebook authors including Barbara Glesner Fines (UMKC), Bruce Green (Fordham), Peter Joy (Washington University St. Louis), Jon Lee (Maine), Carol Needham (St. Louis), and Paula Schaefer (Tennessee). For more information, email Felicia Hamilton at hami3258@stthomas.edu.
May 27 — Submissions Due for International Association of Legal Ethics Deborah Rhode Prize for Early Career Scholars. Submissions are invited on any topic in the field of legal ethics. Papers must have been published or accepted for publication as an article in a journal or chapter in an edited book since the last prize announced at the International Legal Ethics Conference 2022. More details here.
May 29-June 1 — 49th Annual ABA National Conference on Professional Responsibility, Denver. The National Conference on Professional Responsibility is the annual educational and networking event for lawyers who represent, prosecute, advise, and educate other lawyers on issues of ethics, discipline, professionalism, and more. I’ll be speaking on May 30 about hot topics in legal ethics along with Matthew Corbin (Aon) and Hope Todd (DC Bar). More details here.
July 17-19 — International Legal Ethics Conference, University of Amsterdam. Registration opens March 14. More details here.
Wisdom for the Week
“In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.” — Frederick Douglass, Seneca Falls, 1848
Catch Up
Here’s a list with links to some of the most-read editions of the Legal Ethics Roundup.
Keep in Touch
News tips? Announcements? Events? A job to post? Reading recommendations? Email legalethics@substack.com - but be sure to subscribe first, otherwise the email won’t be delivered.
Teaching Professional Responsibility or Legal Ethics? Check out the companion blog for my casebook Professional Responsibility: A Contemporary Approach for teaching ideas and other resources.
Want me to speak about my new book Law Democratized with your group or organization? Email my publicist Sydney Garcia at sydney.garcia@nyu.edu
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