One of the on-going obligations I have is to complete the CLE (continuing legal education) necessary to meet my state bar obligations. This includes completing 6 hours of ethics training.
An issue frequently explored in CLE ethics training classes is competence. In particular, the ethical issues associated with lawyers taking on cases in areas that are new to them.
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We all want to be part of the crowd. We want to belong.
From an ethics perspective, conforming to group norms can be good but it can also be very, very bad.
Groupthink is defined as the practice of approaching issues as matters to be dealt with by consensus of a group rather than by individuals acting independently.
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One of the ethical principles everyone knows is “Tell the Truth.”
Easy to say, often hard to do.
It is even difficult to know what “the truth” is in some cases.
Most of us mean to tell the truth but we may not always accomplish this.
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I am a big fan of PolitiFact and MythBusters.
PolitiFact is an independent fact-checking journalism website. It is a division of my local newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times. MythBusters is a television program on the Discovery Channel. The show’s hosts test the validity of rumors,
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A week ago, an e-mail newsletter article published by Information Week in honor of Halloween caught my attention. The title was 14 Creepiest Ways to Use Big Data.
The creepiest one for me was number 8, Someone’s Time is Up, which focused on potential software design issues associated with self-driving cars.
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My dad had a favorite expression –
“Figures sometimes lie and liars sometimes figure.”
The truth of this expression was reinforced last week when U.S. Congressman Jason Chaffetz used a graph in a hearing on Planned Parenthood funding. This graph was prepared by the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life.
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The idea for this article came from a webinar announcement I received in my e-mail. The topic of the webinar was understanding the rules for pesticide use on marijuana crops. Now, instead of killing off marijuana plants, the goal is to protect both the plants and the customers for these crops.
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Yesterday, I was contemplating my “to do” list trying to figure out how I was going to get everything done. I soon realized it was not possible – there simply were not enough hours available to do it all.
I had to prioritize. I was going to have to decide what was going to be done and what going to remain undone.
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Last week, Farid Fata, a Michigan doctor, was sentenced to 45 years in jail for subjecting more than 500 patients to cancer treatments they did not need so he could collect millions in insurance payments. According to CBS News, he told healthy patients they were sick, he told sick patients they were dying,
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We all make mistakes.
Making mistakes is part of being human.
There are many factors that contribute to making mistakes, including inattention, lack of experience and over-confidence. In recent years, the field of behavior-based safety has exploded. Much of its focus is on assessing why people make mistakes,
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