State bar confuses silence with loyalty (again)

The state bar has run an on-line article about our rule petition to change SCR 1.9 so that Wisconsin attorneys can exercise our basic free speech rights with regard to public information about our former clients' cases.  You can find our petition and supporting documents here.  You can find the state bar's article here.  And reproduced below is my comment to the article:

This [state bar] article demonstrates that Rule 1.9 is so unclear, even the state bar ethics committee can't tell us what it means. In addition to the discussion of all of the possibilities of what it might mean, Tim Pierce even gets part of it wrong. For example, the article states (quoting Tim Pierce from the earlier oral arguments on the rule petition) that informed consent does not have to be in writing. Well, wait until you are in front of the OLR for a violation. Here's what the Wisconsin comment to Rule 1.9 reads: "The Wisconsin Supreme Court Rule differs from the Model Rule in requiring informed consent to be confirmed in a writing signed by the client." 

State Bar News

Here are three pieces of bar related news for The Dog's readers.  FIRST, the ABA is pushing to make state bar exams uniform.  This would allow lawyers to more easily move from state to state to find jobs.  Unfortunately, newly licensed lawyers would know even less about their specific state's law than they currently do -- and that's bad news for would-be clients.

SECOND, our state bar here in Wisconsin opposes our proposed change to ethics rule 1.9 -- color me surprised.  Our bar collects our dues and is supposed to be working for us, yet has chosen to "protect" the public from lawyers' discussion of public information, rather than protecting our basic free speech rights.  If the Wisconsin bar has its way, we lawyers will still be prevented from talking about even the public aspects (e.g., published appellate court decisions) of our former clients' cases -- also known as our cases.  This is clearly unconstitutional, but our bar and other mandatory bars love to be perceived as protecting the public at its lawyer-members' expense.

THIRD, Wisconsin's mandatory bar can get away with taking our money and then working to violate our basic constitutional rights because it's an entrenched bureaucracy that we are forced to join.  But the bar ought to rethink its position, because it might not enjoy this insanely privileged status forever.  In Arizona, for example, the Irreverent Lawyer is leading a movement to dismantle the mandatory bar and turn it into a voluntary organization.  If he is successful, their state bar bureaucracy would shrivel up faster than a grape in the southwest desert summer sun.   (That is, few lawyers would join if they're not forced to do so.)  Good luck, Irreverent One!  Why don't you take care of business in Arizona, and then come to Wisconsin and take on our mandatory bar?  Knightly offers his assistance in the fight for freedom of speech and freedom of association.            

Coloring books, case law, and the Devil’s Dictionary

In my second book, Tried and Convicted: How Police, Prosecutors, and Judges Destroy Our Constitutional Rights (Rowman & Littlefield), I discussed how the police indoctrinate kids at a young age through “Deputy Friendly.”  The good deputy’s message is clear: the police are your friends and they’re here to help.  Conversely, I lamented, early education excludes anything that runs contrary to that pro-government theme.  If you doubt that, try to imagine anyone teaching young people about how the police are permitted to lie to us, how we have the right to tell them to “pound sand” when they want us to talk, and how we can demand the presence of an attorney to gum-up the government machinery.  (Hard to visualize such an education, isn’t it?)  But as successful as Deputy Friendly has been indoctrinating America’s youth, I think the judiciary has just topped him with the publication of Learning about Judges: A Coloring Book.

Changing Rule 1.9

There's been some progress on our petition to modify Wisconsin's SCR 1.9 (c), the rule that prevents attorneys from talking about even the public aspects of their closed cases.  In a nutshell, Terry Rose and I are trying to restore some sanity to the situation.  We are asking the supreme court to define "generally known" to include information that is publicly available or has been disclosed in a public forum, and further to recognize that, by definition, generally known information has already been "revealed."

The lawyer advertising double standard

Unemployed and under-employed law graduates have sued several law schools, claiming the schools used false or misleading employment data to induce them to enroll and spend $150,000-or-so of their yet-to-be-earned dollars.  One law school advertising tactic, for example, was to label jobless graduates as “not seeking” employment; this allowed a school to hide the abysmally high unemployment rate of its graduates.  Another, more common tactic was to count graduates as “employed” even when their jobs had absolutely nothing to do with law (e.g., working at Starbucks), or were only temporary jobs created by the law school to artificially boost its employment statistics.  Another was to say that, for example, 92 percent of all grads were employed, when in fact only 92 percent of the 40 percent who responded to the survey were employed.  In sum, law school advertising at many schools took tremendous liberties in spinning the facts.    

Citizenfour

In her Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, Laura Poitras exposes the extent and impact of our government’s domestic spying operations.  Her documentary focuses on Edward Snowden, and includes many of the things you’d expect to see in great filmmaking.  For example, there is the early congressional testimony of an NSA bureaucrat who repeatedly denied that the government intercepts our emails, phone calls, texts, and google searches.  But later, another NSA bureaucrat testified and tried to spin it: The NSA does not intercept such data “wittingly.”  It does so “inadvertently, perhaps,” but not “wittingly.”  (This type of statement makes the testimony of cigarette company executives — “I believe that nicotine is not addictive” — appear truthful by comparison.)

Race matters in eyewitness identifications

By now, most people have seen the video of former professional tennis player James Blake being roughed up by a New York cop in a case of mistaken identification.  (If you’re familiar with names like Agassi, Sampras, and Federer but haven’t heard of Blake, the guy was not a superstar but he was legit; he earned more than $1 million in prize money alone in 2008.)  And once this video surfaced, several worthwhile issues have been raised, including police brutality, police cover-ups, and disparate treatment of minorities.  But two topics have largely been glossed over.

Petition to modify Wisconsin SCR 20:1.9

Madison, WI

Most attorneys confuse ethics rule 1.9 with the evidence rule of attorney-client privilege. (Chalk this up to another colossal failure of legal education.) But ethics rule 1.9 is much broader, and essentially prevents an attorney from discussing, writing about, or otherwise disclosing even public information about his or her closed cases. Among other problems, this rule is a clear violation of an attorney’s free speech rights. In fact, the state of Virginia has already said as much, as its supreme court held that an ethics rule may not prevent an attorney from discussing the public aspects of his or her closed cases. And other states, such as Alaska, permit attorneys to discuss the public aspects of their closed cases for CLE purposes. So fellow attorney Terry Rose and I have filed a petition with the Wisconsin Supreme Court to modify ethics rule 1.9. The very modest modifications would permit an attorney to discuss, write about, or otherwise disclose public information about his or her closed cases. You can find our two-page petition at this link. You can find our fifteen-page supporting memorandum that blasts rule 1.9 at this link. Wisconsin attorneys who want to support our petition can do so by following the instructions at this link. Our petition and memorandum are based on my forthcoming article, On the Absurdity of Model Rule 1.9, which will be published in the Vermont Law Review in January 2016.

Seneca on judges (and a 2,000 year-old practice tip for defense lawyers)

I’ve written numerous times how judges often fail to grasp even the most basic legal principles — including, for example, the concept of hearsay.  (See here, here, and here for just a few of those posts.)  This is incredibly frustrating for defense lawyers who go to trial intending to put on evidence in defense of their clients.  But there’s good news.  A Stoic philosopher named Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 bc – 65 ad) offers some advice for the criminal defense lawyer.  This advice will certainly help us keep our composure in court, and might even increase our odds of successfully educating the judge — though educating the prosecutor, who typically raises the inappropriate objection to our evidence in the first place, may be beyond hope.

“I think I’m dead, therefore I exist”

Some blogs get a lot of praise and even make a lot of money by simply linking to -- and, despite copyright laws, sometimes actually reprinting -- the writing of other blogs and websites.  The Legal Watchdog, on the other hand, consists nearly entirely of original work.  But every once in a while I come across a flurry of other articles, blog posts, and podcasts that I simply must share with The Dog’s readers.  Let’s begin out west, and the state of their state bars.  As the Irreverent Lawyer tells us, there is evidence that Cal Bar is a “bloated, arrogant, oblivious and unresponsive” bureaucracy.  (I’ve previously written about the Golden State here and here.)  So when the AZ Bar wanted to remake itself, where did it look for guidance?  You guessed it: Goin’ back to Cali.  Read the Irreverent One’s sharp, biting, entertaining, and comically illustrated post, “State auditor slams the Cal Bar . . .”