I wrote recently about an Illinois case where a lawyer was sued by a client for disclosing his mental health struggles in a court filing. I also wrote about Norm Pattis being suspended for sloppy handling of some medical records of a party in a high-profile case. Now the Massachusetts Bar Association has issued an interesting ethics opinion on whether a lawyer could/should/might be disciplined for disclosing the names of cases in which she was counsel on her website, CV or in advertising. You can read it here. It set off a bit of a firestorm in the national lawyer ethics bar.

Granted, we ethics nerds get our shorts in a knot over a lot of stuff mere mortals shrug at, but this one caused me to stop and think because it’s something I have always wondered about. I have seen this on many lawyers’ CVs. They have a section called “representative cases” with reported decisions in which the lawyer was counsel for a party printed with case citations. There’s a corollary situation, where a lawyer hits big on a case and either issues a press release or answers reporters’ questions in a news piece. I have also seen websites that list “representative” clients. The question in all these cases is when does this conduct violate Rule 1.6’s duty of confidentiality?