Legal Ethics Forum

NY gets into the groove; adopts Model Rules

It appears that New York is ditching its Model Code rules in favor of the Model Rules.  (That's so 80's.)  It will be nice not to have deal with ECs and DRs anymore.

The American Lawyer Media article says NY is thereby becoming the "last Bar in the United States to have rules of ethical behavior based in form and substance on the American Bar Association's Model Rules of Professional Conduct."  But that depends on how we characterize California.  We have different numbering and while some of the rules are similar to the Model Rules, many of the key provisions are radically different.  Sadly, we lack rules on basic issues and we cram multiple issues into densely packed rules. 

All that is supposed to be changing now that the California State Bar has a Rules Revision Commission that is supposed to revise California's rules to make them closer to the Model Rules.  But no one is expecting California's revisions to be done any time soon.

Overview of the Inadvertent Disclosure Problem

Here's a useful summary of the problem in the National Law Journal.  It's worth a look, and not just because the authors happen to cite me!

Pakistani lawyers oppose Musharraf, are physically beaten

Pakistani lawyers protest for the rule of law and are beaten down for it.  Stories all over the net, including here.  Can any of our readers point me toward information on the kinds of lawyers doing the protesting, or a background piece on the sacking of the Chief Justice?

Alafair Burke on "Prosecutorial Passion, Cognitive Bias, and Plea Bargaining"

My thanks to John for the invitation to blog about my article, Prosecutorial Passion, Cognitive Bias, and Plea Bargaining, forthcoming in Marquette's plea bargaining symposium edition.

Previously, here and here, I have argued that cognitive biases might cause even virtuous prosecutors to engage accidently in what has traditionally been described as prosecutorial misconduct. In this piece, I explore prosecutorial decision making in the plea bargaining context. Using narratives from current and former prosecutors, I argue that prosecutors decide whether and how flexibly to plea bargain based on their level of passion for individual cases, a subjective evaluation that goes beyond the more objective factors identified in traditional descriptions of plea negotiations. As a result of prosecutorial passion, prosecutors might either consciously refrain from plea bargaining or unknowingly skew negotiated outcomes because of cognitive biases that will make settlement less likely. The Article concludes with some brief thoughts regarding the implications of prosecutorial passion for plea bargaining reform.

Law students prevail in fees suit against University of California

A few years ago, some UC-Berkeley graduate students in professional schools felt that the school had broken a promise not to raise professional school fees.  So, they did what law students are trained to do: they sued.  They won at trial.  Now the California Court of Appeal has affirmed that result.  The key graf:

In Friday's ruling, the court noted that Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school made such a promise [not to raise fees] in its catalogs before the lawsuit was filed. For students entering in 1999 or 2000, "the (fee) is $6,000 per year, and it will remain at that level for their three years in the J.D. program," the catalog read.

The driving force behind the suit has been former Berkeley law student Mohammad Kashmiri. 

(Obviously the reporter didn't get the memo: it's not Boalt anymore.  And in case you thought you saw a typo up above, for some reason we Californians don't have a court of "appeals"; we have a court of "appeal.")

McDermott's reserve army of the (lesser employed) laywers

McDermott is officially doing what other firms have done less formally: created a second tier of attorneys to work pricipally on e-discovery and other document review.  It's part of the growing commercialization of law firm structure.  It has lots of implications about student debt, bi-modal salary distributions and the like.

Top Ten Legal Ethics Traps

Hat tip to Jim Calloway's Blog for its link to this nice ABA Journal article that describes some common legal ethics problems and ways to avoid them.