As I have occasionally mentioned here, I have been working since late 2024 on a project to expose and reform the metastasizing corruption in the legal profession involving mass torts, litigation finance, and recent loosening of law firm structure regulations. My merry band is making progress…I think… but the depth and breadth of the dishonesty and greed in the legal system has been a nasty revelation. I am quite disillusioned about it.
The fraud, crimes and misconduct involve major firms, legal associations, bar associations, judges, doctors, lawyers of course, legislators, hedge funds and lenders. The victims are plaintiffs, veterans, families, ethical but unsuspecting lawyers, and the justice system itself. When I attempted to bring my own bar association into the campaign to clean up the mess, and warned that its failure to adequately police its members was a significant element of the scandal, I was suddenly and without explanation dismissed as the bar’s primary legal ethics CLE trainer after 30 years.
It would be strange indeed if the legal profession is becoming increasingly unethical and addicted to cheating while college students are moving in the opposite direction. But hey…I’ll take my hope however I can get it.
Ethics Alarms 
It must have been in the late 1980s Mrs. OB and I took our then early teen children and a friend of theirs to Palo Alto to watch Notre Dame play a football game against Stanford. During half time, the snotty Stanford band, famous for not wearing uniforms and not marching in any organized formation, were led around the field by a drum major wearing clerical garb and a papal mitre while keeping time by waving a papal ferula (the rod with a knob on top surmounted by a cross). It was probably the most crass, insulting thing I’d ever seen.