For countless and varied reasons, lawyers violate ethical rules, court rules, common protocols, civil procedure and even criminal statutes in the practice of our profession.  Sometimes our offenses are subtle, unintended and unnoticed. Other times, they are egregious, flagrant, destructive and far-reaching. Our offenses run the full gamut from innocent transgression to frontal assault, from sloppy (or non-existent) bookkeeping to feathering our retirement from funds siphoned from a client’s estate. Irrespective of the gravity of the offense, whenever lawyers act wrongfully, we violate at least one RPC in the process. As a result, our offenses are often more dangerous to us than to anyone else.

With an apology to readers who object to the word “crazy,” today’s column looks at bad attorney behavior when that behavior stems from a character disorder or a mental illness or defect. Unreliable empirical data gathered at this writer’s desk proves that lawyers are, as a group, crazier than most. The same factors—genetic, environmental and acquired—that explain mental or emotional disorder or disease in the rest of the population also apply to us, plus, as attorneys, our stressful jobs and lifestyles readily morph into additional neuroses and psychoses.  Little wonder that suicides and suicidal thinking are so common among our colleagues, especially when they are caught acting wrongfully.

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