legal ethics

Wait…The Judge And The Defense Attorney Were Having An Affair, And The Defendants Were Convicted Anyway? So What’s The Problem?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments
"Yes, counsel, I am throwing the book at your clients because I love you."*

“Yes, counsel, I am throwing the book at your clients because I love you.”*

The Georgia Court of Appeals has ordered new trials for five men convicted of serious crimes in Fayette County because their trial judge was having an undisclosed affair with defendants’ public defender.

Doesn’t  that seem strange to you? After all, the clients of the judge’s secret love were convicted and sentenced. Why should they get the benefit of  new trials when the judge’s evident conflict and judicial misconduct didn’t benefit them or harm them in any way (unless a judge making sure his lover’s clients get prison time is a quirky way to say “I love you” in the Peach Tree State). This isn’t like the horrendous Charles Dean Hood case in Texas, where a man was sentenced to death after a trial in which the state prosecutor was sleeping with the judge.

The Georgia judge-lawyer affair (and I thought Steven Bochco was making it all up!) came to light in 2010. Paschal English, who subsequently resigned as chief Superior Court judge, had been involved in a romantic relationship with assistant public defender Kimberly Cornwell, who has also moved on to new pursuits, ideally those that don’t require trust or ethics. A three judge panel recently agreed that this relationship, undisclosed and a clear cut ethical violation for both judge and attorney, required that there be new trials for Christopher Wakefield and Travion Willis on charges of armed robbery, kidnapping, aggravated assault and other crimes; William Nutt for aggravated child molestation and aggravated sexual battery; Rashad Arnold for burglary; and Calvin Boynton for armed robbery, aggravated assault, possession of a sawed-off shotgun and drug possession.

Hmmmm… Continue reading →

“How Dare Universities Charge Such High Tuition?” KABOOM!* #1: Georgetown University Law Center

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments
headexplode

Kaboom.

James Feinerman, the James M. Morita Professor of Asian Legal Studies at Georgetown University Law Center, who also serves as its associate dean for transnational programs, was hired by the U.S. government as an expert witness  to bolster the prosecution in a spying case, and apparently plagiarized a substantial potion of the report submitted to the court from <sigh–there goes that value of THAT degree> Wikipedia.The defense picked up on the uncited cribbing and the federal court is now examining whether the sources used by Wikipedia are reliable enough for his report to be accorded any validity. The Government, meanwhile, represented by assistant U.S. attorneys Peter Axelrod and John Hemann, is stuck with making desperate “ahumunahumuna” sounds like Ralph Kramden used to do on “The Honeymooners” when he was caught looking stupid and spouting lame arguments in court filings about how Feinerman “utilized language from Wikipedia as a concise English-language summary of his opinions on certain topics.”

Riiiight. Continue reading →

My JFK Ethics Tale

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

 Shredded Files

As regular readers here  know, I am not an admirer of the character of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, though he had some notable leadership skills that I respect. His reputation as a great man and President is vastly inflated and, in a strange way, I may share some of the responsibility for that.

Several years ago, I had just completed an ethics seminar for the DC Bar. One of the issues I discussed was the lawyer’s ethical duty to protect  attorney-client confidences in perpetuity, even after the death of the client. An elderly gentleman approached me, and said he had an important question to ask. He was retired, he said, and teased that I would want to hear his story. I don’t generally give out ethics advice on the fly like this, but I was intrigued.

“My late law partner, long before he began working with me, was Joseph P. Kennedy’s “‘fixer,'” he began, hooking me immediately. “Whenever Jack, Bobby or Teddy got in trouble, legal or otherwise, Joe would pay my partner to ‘take care of it,’ whatever that might entail. Well, my partner died last week, and when I saw him for the last time, he gave me the number of a storage facility, the contract, and the combination to the lock. He said that I should take possession of what was in there, and that I would know what to do. Continue reading →

Unethical Quote Of The Week: Attorney Lee J. Danforth

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

“If this trial prevents one little girl or one mother or father from reporting suspected abuse then this is profoundly sad for our society.”

 —-Lee J. Danforth, attorney,making a lightly veiled argument that his clients should suffer no penalties for ruining a teacher’s career and reputation with a false accusation of “inappropriate touching,” because such penalties would discourage future legitimate accusations.

"Oh, you all were lying when you got John Proctor hung as a witch? Well, that's okay---we wouldn't want to punish you, because it might discourage a real victim, in case there really IS a witch one of these days...

“Oh, you all were lying when you got John Proctor hung as a witch? Well, that’s okay—we wouldn’t want to punish you, because it might discourage a real victim, in case there really IS a witch one of these days…

Mr. Danforth was defending a San Jose, California family in a defamation suit by a former Catholic school physical education teacher, John Fischler,  who claimed that they methodically destroyed his reputation with a campaign of rumors and lies, led by his main accuser, an 11-year-old girl right out of “The  Children’s Hour” or “The Crucible.” Danforth is a lawyer (Danforth was also the name of the judge in the Salem witch trials, speaking of “The Crucible” and false accusations) , and it is sometimes necessary, and thus ethical, for lawyers to make otherwise unethical arguments in the zealous representation of their despicable clients. Remember, legal ethics does not allow Danforth to temper his advocacy out of concern for future, genuine victims, unlike his clients. They are not his concern, and even bad people have a right to vigorous legal representation. Nonetheless, his statement embodies an unethical rationalization for letting diabolical and vicious false accusers escape the just consequences for their actions. Continue reading →

The Unprofessional Cause Of Unprofessional Lawyer Brian Zulberti

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Brian ZYoung Brian Zulberti may be nice guy. He may even be a competent lawyer, though the chances of his being able to demonstrate that are diminishing daily. Nevertheless, his quixotic and misguided, and dare I say it, really stupid, quest to show that professionalism, judgment and character are not properly relevant to the practice of law is an exercise in hubris that must fail, deserves to fail, and of course, will fail, leaving him to pick up the pieces of fifteen minutes of media fame purchased at the price of a reputation. It looks like he’s having fun, and that’s something, I guess. Ten years from now, I doubt that he’ll think it was worth it.

Shortly after passing the Delaware Bar, Zulberti, a 2009 law school grad,  emailed the entire Bar membership asking for a job. In lieu of his résumé;  he attached a photo of himself in a Villanova Law muscle shirt that would be more at home on a dating site for the shallow. The web also contained his half-naked selfies, and various websites with varying motives picked up the story. Interviewed on YouTube, Zulberti proclaimed that being true to himself was more important to him than getting hired, and that he wasn’t about to change his Facebook privacy settings to portray himself as a traditional, dignified, applicant for legal work.

Let me pause here to say that in many ways I sympathize with Zulberti. Continue reading →

Encore: “The Ethics of Letting a Lying Defendant Testify”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments
"Objection! The defendant's pants are clearly on fire!"

“Objection! The defendant’s pants are clearly on fire!”

I’m in Ohio today, talking about legal ethics with a large law firm, and the discussion there turned to the difficult problem of the lying criminal client. Here is a post on the topic from the early days of Ethics Alarms, slightly updated, and the disturbing thing is that we are no closer to finding a satisfactory and ethical solution to the problem.

What do you do when your guilty client wants to claim he’s innocent in the witness chair, under oath? Continue reading →

Online Review Ethics: Yelp And The Law Firm

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments
"...and so do our own employees!"

“…and so do our own employees!”

Is it professional misconduct for members of a law firm or the non-lawyer assistants for which they are responsible to post fake reviews of their work to a consumer website? I would argue that could be: it is almost certainly deceptive advertising, which is prohibited to a greater or lesser degree in all state ethics codes, and it is dishonest and misleading communications of the sort that has drawn discipline for some attorneys in other circumstances. Whether or not such a slimy, if common practice (at least among other professions, like wrtiting) is sufficient to raise “a substantial question as to that lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness or fitness as a lawyer in other respects” will be determined by lawyers themselves, and you would be amazed at what many of them  don’t consider sufficient to do this. I am admittedly extreme on this issue: I don’t think lawyers should lie, and take a dimmer version of even harmless deception than most in my field. This is profession that depends on trust, and the more someone lies—I don’t care about what—the less trustworthy they are.

These issues arise because the online consumer site Yelp appears to have caught employees of the law firm The MacMillan Group posting fake positive reviews about itself, on behalf of fictional clients. Continue reading →

Comment of The Day…And An Ethics Quiz, Too! : “Ethics Quiz: The United Airlines Give-Away”

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments
"Oh, this piece of junk? Yeah, who knows who its supposed to be---some guy named Veal or Beale or something painted it, I think. It's been in the attic. Make me an offer!"

“Oh, this piece of junk? Yeah, who knows who it’s supposed to be—some guy named Veal or Beale or something painted it, I think. It’s been in the attic. Make me an offer!”

The Ethics Quiz regarding whether or not it was unethical to take full advantage of United Airlines’  accidental fire sale on tickets spawned several good hypotheticals, including this one, from Tyrone T., an occasional Ethics Alarms commenter who, I happen to know, thinks about these matters as his occupation. I know the answer to this one (I’ve seen it before), so I’ll hold off until you’ve thought about it a while.

Here is Tyrone T.’s Comment of the Day on the post “Ethics Quiz: The United Airlines Give-Away”:

“So, if you are hired by your client to find the cheapest fare, can you act ethically and refuse to take advantage of the error? Consider the following:

“Alexander Mundy is a lawyer and an acknowledged expert in American painting. He has several clients who regularly retain him to negotiate the purchase of museum quality art. Recently, a client hired Mundy to negotiate the purchase of a portrait of George Washington as a young man.

“The client explained, ‘I saw it on a house tour five years ago and tried to buy it then, but the woman who owned it said it was a family heirloom and wasn’t interested in selling. I heard that she died recently and her husband is having an Estate Sale. You have authority to purchase the painting for up to $500,000.’

“Mundy goes to visit the old widower and asks whether he would be willing to sell ‘that picture of the young man there.’ Continue reading →

Don’t Blame The Lawyers: The Ethical, Unethical, NFL Settlement

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments
Watch your heads!

Watch your heads!

When is a $765 million dollar law suit settlement “chump change”?  This is when, reading the reactions to the NFL’s announcement last week of its agreement with former players who sued the league over crippling  concussion injuries sustained while playing professional football:

  • It is inadequate when half of that will be ladled out over seventeen years, and all of it will be reduced by the lawyer’s fees, to be determined but unlikely to be less than a third.  That means that each former player (or his heirs and family) will get, at most, $114, 000 or so.
  • It is inadequate when the league paying the damages will split the payment among its 32 franchises, making each responsible for paying $24 million over 20 years, which comes to about $1.2 million a year. Remember that projected NFL revenues this season are $10 billion, and the NFL gets more than $40 billion on top of that through 2022, thanks to media rights.

In other words, chump change.

Or, if you prefer, “I gave my brain, mind and health to the NFL, and all I got was this lousy settlement.” Continue reading →

Now THAT’S An Untrustworthy Legal Secretary!

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

 

"Hey! That's Barbara! See you at wok, Monday, Barbara!"

“Hey! That’s Barbara! See you at work, Monday, Barbara!”

The Connecticut Law Tribune reports that Barbara Kalpin, a former legal secretary at the Waterbury law firm of Grady & Riley,  has been charged with stealing more than $1 million while forging dozens of checks and documents.

She was, the story says, “a longtime and trusted employee at the firm.” It seems the firm’s trust was misplaced.  Investigators have discovered that she spent about $500,000 over the last few years at an off-track betting venue in New Haven for horse and dog racing. According to police, she wrote 93 checks from a client fund that she managed, among other things using the money to pay credit card bills and to finance multiple mortgages on her home. Kalpin is facing two counts of first-degree larceny and 112 counts of second-degree forgery, and is awaiting arraignment next week.

Connecticut’s bar, like every that of every other state, imposes a strict obligation on attorneys to supervise non-lawyers who are placed in positions of assisting in legal work and the handling of client matters: Continue reading →