Hal R. Lieberman This article concerns the due process rights of New York lawyers facing disciplinary charges. It highlights the historical constitutional development of due process rights in attorney discipline cases, briefly focuses on the relatively few precedents that address procedural due process in New York’s uniquely disjointed lawyer disciplinary system, and then describes the ABA’s Model Rules … Read more
Attorneys who bully or neglect their clients, steal from escrow accounts, overbill, lie to authorities and generally ignore the Code of Professional Responsibility have been the focus of Hal R. Lieberman’s practice for more than 25 years. Mr. Lieberman honed his skills in the legal ethics and professional liability field as assistant bar counsel in … Read more
Professional Responsibility One of the hallmarks of a fair and properly functioning disciplinary system is even-handed treatment of the principal participants in that system, to wit, complainants and respondent lawyers. Unfortunately, because of its disjointed grievance structure, whereby each of the four appellate departments separately and non-uniformly oversees all aspects of attorney discipline in its geographic … Read more
Important Concepts on Ethical Duties Of Loyalty and to Maintain Confidentiality Every lawyer, whether engaged in litigation or transactional work, must have a working knowledge of the law relating to conflicts of interest to properly deal with conflicts situations when they arise, as they very likely will. Failure to have such an understanding can result … Read more
Managing Client or Third-Party Funds Requires Close Study of Fiduciary Accounting Rules One of the saddest things I have encountered during nearly 20 years of practice in the field of legal ethics and professional discipline is the demise of a career in law — literally, someone’s life work — because of sloppiness, ignorance, or the inability … Read more
Small Firms and Solos Are Often Subject to Disciplinary Complaints and Malpractice Claims Every year literally thousands of New York attorneys are recipients of client disciplinary complaints, and many are also sued for malpractice. The vast majority of these respondents (to use the disciplinary parlance) are small firm and solo practitioners. Even more ominously, the numbers … Read more
Attorney Joseph Masterson married Mary Masterson in 1956. Forty-one years later, he purportedly married Mingli Yang without divorcing his first wife. At the time of his second wedding, Mr. Masterson submitted an application to the city clerk falsely affirming he had never been married. The Appellate Division, Second Department, determined that Masterson had engaged in … Read more
Back in 1880, the New York Court of Appeals, in In re: Eldridge,1 suspended a lawyer for writing out answers for witnesses. In its holding, the Court said that a lawyer’s duty is to extract the facts from the witness, not pour them into him; to learn what the witness does know, not teach him what … Read more
Copyright (c) 1997 Hofstra Law Review Association; Hal R. Lieberman “[J]unk justice.“1 “‘[R]acist.”’2 “ “[A]nti-semitism.”’3 Appellate judges are “‘the whores who became madams.”’4 “‘[S] onofabitch.”’5 Inflammatory attacks on judges and the judiciary, like the foregoing lawyers’ comments reported in the press, are becoming more common. Should such remarks be tolerated under the First Amendment, or … Read more