I hear a lot of grousing about the new MCLE regime and the time and effort it’s going to take to comply. The complainers get no comfort from me. In addition to being, as one judge noted, “laughably easy” to comply, my work in lawyer misconduct continues to remind me how important the two hours of mandatory ethics training is and how many of us will avoid grievances and other trouble by being forced to think about easily remedied conduct that continues to get us into trouble.
For instance, a colleague preparing a case here sent me a recent report from another jurisdiction concerning a sex-with-a-client prosecution. In that case, the lawyer and client both had sex with the client’s wife at the same time in some sort of three-way deal. (And you thought ethics was dry and boring!) The lawyer successfully defended the grievance on the basis that he never really had sex with the client, which is what’s prohibited by the rule.
