Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts from the ATL Career Center’s team of expert contributors. Today, from Ross Guberman, a look at lawyers’ ethical breaches and their consequences.
Quick: List all the ways you can get into ethical hot water while writing a brief, and then list all the things judges can do to you in return.
Sometimes lawyers go too far, but do judges ever overreact?
I interviewed Judy Fischer, author of Pleasing the Court (affiliate link), on wayward lawyers and the angry judges who penalize them:
In your short and fascinating book, we meet all sorts of wayward attorneys who are in some way punished by courts for something they've done in a brief. One attorney called the members of an administrative board "monkeys" and compared their pronouncements to the "grunts and groans of an ape." Another attorney neglected to mention an unfavorable case even though he himself was counsel in that case. Yet another referred to opposing counsel as "Nazis and redneck pepper-woods." And various other attorneys drafted a proposed order with a first sentence that's nearly four pages long, filed a complaint that the court called a "hideous sprawling mess," cited a dissent as controlling authority, or copied another lawyer's brief.
When you compare all these alleged ethical breaches with the penalties they provoked, what are a few of the behaviors that seem to irk judges most?
Read more at the ATL Career Center….
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