Tagged: ethics

Q&A Dump

I’m on the road today, but I wanted to post something. So I’m going to cheat and cut-and-paste some recent Q&A posts from my Tumblr. If you’re looking for a longer read, go check out my comic, which just completed a long section involving how the Fourth Amendment plays out...

Why Are You Here?

The other day, the Charleston School of Law was kind enough to invite me to speak to its student body as part of its Professionalism lecture series. My theme was, of course, professionalism in the law. But in the context of why we practice law. If you’re interested, have a...

A Pattern of Misconduct by Federal Prosecutors?

When we left the Manhattan DA’s office some years ago, we firmly believed that prosecutorial misconduct was as rare as it was despicable.  We can’t think of a single one of our colleagues for whom it would have even occurred to cut corners, and it certainly would not have been...

Conviction Rates Matter

On Sunday, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a lengthy article on that city’s abysmal conviction rate for violent crimes. For every three violent-crime arrests in Philadelphia, only one results in a conviction. There are a lot of worse-sounding statistics in that article, but they’re completely meaningless, as they refer only to...

Billable Hours vs. Flat Fees

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article on how companies are starting to insist on flat fees for legal services. In the economic recession, companies are starting to complain that lawyers billing by the hour (or the tenth of the hour) only creates incentives for those lawyers to work inefficiently...

Yet More Prosecutorial Misconduct by the Feds

We’ve asked it before, but what the heck is going on with some of these federal prosecutors nowadays? There was the whole Ted Stevens fiasco over the winter, when the feds actively withheld exculpatory evidence and witnesses in their rush to convict the former Senator. Then the 7th Circuit directed...