Professionalism And Legal Malpractice CLE

An attorney is a professional; and being a good and respected attorney means more than just making lots of money and having lots of clients. It means displaying, encouraging, and garnering reciprocal professionalism. In this introduction to legal professionalism, we cover some of the major temptations, quandaries, and slip ups that attorneys can handle properly if they adhere to a high standard of professionalism. We also review a sample state’s creed on professionalism, as well as a recent ethics - related case before ending with a summary of suggested best practices for maintaining the highest standards of professionalism and avoiding the scrutiny of the local bar’s ethics board.

The entrepreneurial cannabis industry requires legal assistance like any other growing, innovative business sector. However, the cannabis industry does not necessarily resemble other evolving start-up business areas. Unlike most other industries, cannabis continues to be a federally designated illegal controlled substance, while various states have legalized cannabis and planted a patchwork garden of cannabis statutes, regulations, and ethics advisory opinions. What’s a lawyer to do? Legal ethics questions abound! What type of legal assistance may a lawyer provide to a client involved in the cannabis industry? May a lawyer accept product or an interest in a cannabis business in lieu of fees? Will a lawyer who participates in a medical marijuana program or indulges in recreational cannabis face ethical repercussions? This course will explore the historical context of the cannabis debate, the legal ethics implications for lawyers seeking to represent cannabis clients, and the current state of the legal profession’s response to legal ethics questions posed by lawyers traipsing through the patchwork garden of state regulations.

The two greatest sources of professional risk to attorneys come from overlapping sources – ethical obligations and legal duties to clients. Using real world examples, this course explores a national survey of claims against lawyers based on attorney malpractice and professional misconduct. Common ethical considerations and the relationship between professional responsibility and malpractice exposure will be explored along with growing cyber risks to attorneys. Related causes of action, common defenses and jurisdictional considerations will be reviewed as well as risk management techniques and best practices to mitigate such claims.

The Rules of Professional Conduct contain special rules regarding the duties, obligations, and restrictions applicable to attorneys engaged in litigation, which also includes administrative proceedings. The course will provide an overview of the fundamental ethical rules, and their relationship to substantive rules and law, that litigators encounter. The course will include discussion of the rules that ever litigator needs to fully know and understand in order that they can properly represent their clients in dispute proceedings. Since a violation of the rules can result in significant harm to the client’s case, attorneys should stay fully informed about the pertinent rules. Although the course is basically an ethics course, ideas on how to better represent a client in litigation and comply with the rules will be discussed.

Cyber-based claims are an exponentially growing threat to attorneys. Cyber risks touch on every area of practice and overlap with the two greatest sources of professional risk to attorneys – ethical obligations and legal duties to clients. This course explores the basics of legal malpractice claims along with corresponding ethical considerations in the context of the cyber threat while providing practical advice for anticipating, mitigating and surviving cyber risks and related claims. Cyber-based causes of action, common defenses and jurisdictional considerations will be reviewed as well as risk management techniques and best practices, including an overview of how to develop a cyber risk management team and plan.

This course is designed to teach young and aspiring lawyers the importance of professionalism. The legal profession is a noble profession in which lawyers represent the interests of their clients, but the manner in which lawyers converse with each other is critical to the success of the profession. The best compliment a lawyer can get is a future referral from a former adversary. Professionalism drives this result.

In this ethics program, we explore how to deal with biased and bad judges within the governing ethics standards. We address the fundamental ethics issues involved in challenging a judge for disqualification, as well as the ethics traps for lawyers who make the charge too easily. We use as a case example an explosive, interesting historical case from the Cold War — the serial deportation trials of Harry Bridges. We also use famous current cases to explore the bias issues, as well as improper race-based conduct by judges and lawyers. Along the way, we offer useful tips to protect and advise clients so you tread carefully and safely.

Mental health issues and substance use disorders can affect any attorney, in any setting, and at any time. Left untreated, they can destroy careers and lives. This program will discuss where the legal profession currently stands in relation to the substantial challenges presented by untreated mental health issues and substance use disorders and examine the nexus between ethical competence, under the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, and attorney well-being. This program will educate attendees on how to recognize the signs of an impaired attorney, how to approach the colleague and begin a conversation, and discuss the possible disciplinary and professional liability implications of an impaired attorney’s conduct. In addition, the speaker will present best practices/effective risk management strategies, preventative measures, and proposed policy and well-being initiatives, that attorneys in any practice setting may implement to protect clients, themselves and other firm members as well as save careers.

A well-known legal aphorism states that while a good lawyer knows the law, a great lawyer knows the judge. Kidding aside, in order to be successful, a litigator must routinely have positive interactions with judges. This course will explore ways lawyers can improve their interactions with judges without running afoul of legal and ethical rules that limit the ways that lawyers and judges can interact with one another. Among the topics that will be discussed are MCLE classes and bar receptions, social media, courtroom advocacy and social hospitality.

This one-hour program discusses the science of resilience, patience and gratitude and offers practical skills and exercises to incorporate these practices into our daily life. We focus on the impact of stress on the mind and body, and how the pandemic is adding to stress to an already overly stressed profession. The objective of this course is to provide tools to approach setting expectations given the current environment of uncertainly.

This one-hour program discusses the science of stress and resilience and offers several strategies to combat stress in the legal practice and to prevent burnout. The objective of this course is to provide tools that will increase lawyer competency by learning to identify stress and appropriately respond to stressors.

This one hour presentation will provide a fast-paced refresher on the foundational Rules of Professional Conduct governing our daily lives as practicing attorneys. We will also explore the most common ethics violations attorneys make – often inadvertently – to provide guidance on avoiding these most common mistakes.

How is trial preparation in civil cases New Jersey different from other states’/federal practice? What are the special rules as to discovery? What are the customs and practices? How are the rules of evidence different? How does one preserve errors for appeal? This is an overview with examples from the presenter’s own experience. It is also helpful for new attorneys practicing in New Jersey courts.

Screening clients, scoping cases and setting appropriate expectations of clients is a fundamental part of having a successful legal practice. It’s important to be able to determine whether a potential client fits your (and your firm’s business) model, whether the potential client has any knowledge of the legal remedies available to them, and whether they have a realistic understanding of the costs involved. Setting appropriate expectations from the get-go can make or break your attorney-client relationship. During this hour long seminar, we will address the many issues that can emerge from an attorney’s failure to set appropriate expectations and screen clients, as well as provide tips to ensure that you are set up for success from the very beginning.

The times when people joined firms hoping to become partner and remain until retirement are long past. It is common for lawyers to have more than a dozen positions during their career with some changing jobs more frequently than that. With the recent demand for talent, some people are changing jobs in less than a year. These moves raise issues as to obligations to clients and the client’s rights to select counsel. Lawyers and firms also need to evaluate conflict issues associated with these changes. In addition, departing lawyers and their firms may be bound by partnership agreements that address transition issues. Often neglected by all concerned is staying on good terms, leaving without regard to the other side can have longstanding effect on the reputation of lawyers and firms, and in the worst case, lead to litigation.

Lawyers and staff are drowning in email, and many feel helpless when trying to get it under control. While communicating with clients via email may be quick and easy, there are ethical pitfalls that can cause problems for unwary lawyers. This program will cover how to efficiently store and organize email and attachments, successfully deal with high email volume, and communicate ethically and effectively with clients.

This presentation will provide an overview of multiple aspects of the attorney ethics rules that – may or may not be second nature to practicing attorneys – but are things about which regular people are largely unaware. And, as to some of the topics, even when someone who isn’t a lawyer knows of the rule, the reasons for it can be extremely confusing.

In this program, Heath Cheek looks at the hit TV show, Ted Lasso, the
story of a Kansas college football coach who becomes a Premier League
“football” (soccer) coach in London. Heath will show how Ted’s lessons
can help litigators, in-house counsel, transactional lawyers, and others
improve their practice by using positivity, kindness, warmth, and humor
(attributes not always associated with lawyers). Viewers of this course
will learn how to improve their communication and relationships with
clients, colleagues, and opposing counsel, as well as how to recover
from mistakes with grace.

You’ve identified a great client, but now you need make sure that you’re properly establishing that attorney-client relationship. You’ve withdrawn from a case, but now you need to make sure the client understands that your representation has ended. As with any relationship, knowing how to establish the parameters of an attorney-client relationship, and how to successfully terminate that relationship, is key. Participants in this course will gain an understanding of the importance of successfully establishing an attorney-client relationship, and how to address the end of that relationship.

This course will provide an overview of the Duty of Confidentiality under Model Rule 1.6 as well as privilege and work product rules. We will cover the legal basis of an exceptions to both confidentiality and privilege. This course will analyze the tests to apply and real world application, as well as exploring the overlap of the rules of evidence.

This presentation will address two different topics that might be more related than you think at first. Mistakes in the practice of law are both inevitable and avoidable, and when they occur they trigger a variety of ethical issues and obligations for the lawyers involved. When they happen in the course of representing clients for whom it was a mistake to agree to be their lawyer in the first place, they can be doubly unpleasant. So, in addition to addressing ethical obligations brought about by mistakes, this course will also discuss ways that lawyers can try to avoid taking on “unworthy” clients in the first place.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many lawyers began working remotely from home every day. How do the ethics rules apply to long-term remote or “hybrid” practice? In this course, we will explore some of the rules of professional responsibility implicated by long-term remote and hybrid practice—including the rules of confidentiality, communication, supervision, and competence—and offer practical tips for ethical compliance. We will end with a discussion of the rules on unauthorized practice of law and the ethics opinions offering guidance to lawyers who may be living and working remotely from a state in which they are not admitted to practice.

This presentation will shy away from more cutting edge topics, sometimes of fleeting importance and, instead, will re-center lawyers’ attention to what the presenter has proposed are the five core components providing the “recipe” for ethical lawyering. While limiting its scope to broad topics that are alliterative, this presentation will manage to discuss many more ethics rules than just five, including Model Rules 1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, 1.7-1.10, 1.15, 1.18, 3.3, 4.1, 7.1, and 8.4 among several others.

This course explores the concept of civility and what that looks like in daily legal practice and times of crisis. We will use recent events to define and set the context for upholding civility in the legal profession. We will also review the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct relating to civility and sanctions for failure to uphold it, as well as relevant caselaw.

"Self-care without team care is futile." This is the starting point of this talk. Many people have described the practice of law as toxic, but that toxicity is also how we feel we "have to get things done." What if you could change that? As a partner, law firm manager, or managing attorney, you can. Over the course of an hour, you will be introduced to agile project management techniques that you can implement, immediately, as well as principles and approaches to change the way you see firm management. We will cover the three pillars of the Livable Law legal project management method: tasks, time, and things. You will be able to implement scrum meetings, task lists, efficient calendaring, and document organization.

This course will focus on the history of professionalism in Georgia and explore significant cases that have lead the professionalism movement in Georgia. Attorney Chuck Dalziel will explore the definition of attorney professionalism while using practical examples to illustrate the various aspects of the aspirational statement on professionalism as found in the Lawyers Creed of Georgia.

Want to learn about civility and attorney professionalism? Then, this course is right for you! This course will discuss and define attorney civility and discuss discrimination/bias in the context of the Rules of Professional Conduct. We will focus on Rules of Professional Conduct 8.4(d) and 8.4(g), citing real-life case examples of how attorneys have been disciplined for their conduct. Additionally, this course will discuss potential discrimination/bias that can occur in just running a law firm and how to avoid those pitfalls.

This six-credit course is designed to help Illinois newly-admitted attorneys meet their first year MCLE requirement and impart fundamental skills paramount to the practice of law. Taught by expert faculty, the six sessions range from professionalism to creating a purposeful and inclusive practice. They are:

Session 1: An Attorney's Top 5 Ethical Blunders
Session 2: Lessons to My Former Self: A New Attorney's Guide to a Purposeful Practice
Session 3: Working From Home Ethically: Technological Competence for Lawyers
Session 4: Email Communications for Lawyers: Strategies and Ethics
Session 5: Ensuring Access to Justice for Neurodivergent People
Session 6: Best Behavior: Ethical Strategies for Dealing with Bullying and Bias in the Profession.

Please note that this six hour program contains two checkpoints total. There are not checkpoints within each individual course.