Legal Ethics for New Attorneys: Recent State Bar Attorney Disciplinary Actions
Commonalities of Rules Violations
By Charles V. Berwanger Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani, LLP
In the past several months, the State Bar of California has disbarred or suspended the license to practice law of at least 10 California attorneys. There are common themes threading their way through the disciplinary findings in each of these cases that are important for practitioners to consider. The purpose of this article is to identify some of those themes.Read More
This Ethics in Brief article arises from a recent inquiry I received through the SDCBA Legal Ethics Hotline (phone: 619.231.0781×4145) involving an attorney who posed the hypothetical question of whether an attorney who represents a minor with a guardian ad litem [GAL] could ethically petition the superior court to remove the GAL who the attorney believes is not following the attorney’s advice and not acting in the minor’s best interests?Read More
Despite the unprecedented events occurring since, many of us still remember March 2019 when it was made public that “Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III delivered his Report of the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election to the then-Attorney General of the United States, William P. Barr.”
It is no secret that trial attorneys must navigate ethical minefields as they collect information from their clients, as they engage in discovery, and as they present evidence to judges and juries.
Sparking intense controversy, in 2016 the American Bar Association (“ABA”) amended Model Rule 8.4 to add paragraph (g), making it professional misconduct to “engage in conduct that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law.”
