Some of the more interesting were whether it is honorable to use a tracking device on your associate`s sound to place him, whether a second chair lawyer should tweet during trial and whether a judge should be Facebook friends with an attorney appearing in her court. The answers were: yes, if it is a genuine emergency and you have given prior notice; no, the fellow should be paid attention to the trial, not divulging secret information; and maybe, so long as you truly are friends and you are inclined to recuse yourself.The board felt that you should not blog about a client`s case without their consent. This is a sensitive issue. I have blogged about a few of my cases, but only if they resulted in a published opinion which would not be awkward to the client. I am planning to blog about my experiences in an unusual event that is ongoing, but not until it is over.Now you can claim self-study ethics credit for reading this post.Supreme Court ReviewThis was a really interesting panel featuring Judge Margaret Mahoney, Eric Brunstad and Brett Weiss. I am not going to discourse the cases themselves, since I have already written about them, but will summarize some of the larger conclusions.The panel was uncertain whether Milavetz prohibited advice on pre-petition planning, such as purchasing a more expensive car to tip the means test. However, they did say that the opinion allow counsel to take "good and dog and robust discussions" with the client. So maybe the argument is that you can speak around it, but not commend it.The Lanning case proved that the Supreme Court can work for some unusual alliances. The Chapter 13 trustee, who argued for a mechanical approach to determining projected disposable income, was supported by NACBA, while the Debtor was supported by the United States.Brett Weiss was kind enough to cite the next passage from this blog:
The majority wants the Bankruptcy Code to have sense. Justice Scalia is willing to be a minority of one for the suggestion that when Congress passes laws that are foolish or just plain wrong, that the courts have an indebtedness to make their words back at them and take a foolish judgment Then he said thank goodness the Supreme Court did not be Justice Scalia.Lanning showed the triumph of pragmatism over formalism. The panel encouraged lawyers to study the sentence to educate appellate judges with how bankruptcy actually works because the way bankruptcy works in fact is more mute than in other areas of the law.Schwab v. Reilly was fired as a case that could be overcome through better software. Justice Thomas said that the trouble with the debtor`s claim of freedom was that she claimed a particular dollar value rather than saying she was claiming 100% of the value. Apparently the Rules Committee is considering a modification to the Prescribed Form to provide this. In the meantime, software vendors are already responding to the decision.Espinosa was considered to be in contrast with other Supreme Court opinions on finality of confirmation orders. The number to be considered in litigating these cases is notice. Did they clearly say what they were trying to accomplish? Did the creditor receive actual notice? The Court appeared to be saying that deviant plan provisions were not a major risk because courts would do their main duty to review plans and smoke out the bad ones even where there wasn`t an objection. The panel thought this ignored the practical realities of a bankruptcy judge`s docket.Finally, a cute story to end with. The start sentence that Eric Brunstad argued before the Supreme Court, he brought his six year old girl with him. She brought her teddy bear. However, the marshals would not let a teddy bear in the Supreme Tribunal and took the stuffed bear into custody. After the argument, his daughter ran up to him and said, "Teddy`s in prison. The Martians have him." When you have a bad ruling, you can ever say "The Martians got my case."
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