April 8, 2010

PL 305--Legal Ethics
In class tonight, Thursday 4/8, I first returned the Milavetz case briefs, and I distributed a comment key to my comments on those briefs. I also distributed two other handouts, the Maine Rules of Professional Conduct 1.15 and 1.5, and a selection of cases from Maine dealing with paralegal fees (see assignment below). We went through the Maine Rules and the concepts in the text. We started discussing the cases at the end of Chapter 7 of the text. The Court of Appeals case on p. 293, Richlin v. Chertoff, has been reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court (553 U.S. 571), and I went over that decision. We got as far as the beginning of the Taylor v. Chubb case on p. 302 of the text. We will pick up at that point next Thursday. The additional assignment for Thursday 4/15 is to read the packet of cases from Maine regarding paralegal fees. The cases can all be found on Westlaw, and are: Fleet Bank v. Steeves, 793 F.Supp. 18; Brennan v. Barnhart, 2007 WL 586794; B.C. Produce v. Don's Wholesale, 550 F. Supp.2d 124; Stern v. Astrue, 2009 WL 2824751; and H-D Michigan v. Hannon, 2010 WL 915206.