Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Tuesday, September 26, 2006 11:43:33 PM
THIS IS AN INCOMPLETE POST. IT WILL BE COMPLETE WHEN THIS MESSAGE IS REMOVED, PROBABLY FRIDAY. SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.
The premise is of this series is that it is very easy for an attorney to work with his client to stall a lawsuit indefinitely if both are willing to perjure themselves by jointly claiming that the attorney wasn't communicating with his client. This scam carries almost no risk to either the attorney or the litigant.
If one took the ethics rules, both lawyer and judicial, at face value and assumed that they would be enforced as they seem to read this scam would be impossible to execute and dangerous to try. By now, even a casual reader of this blog knows that isn't happening, at least in Colorado.
The ethics and court rules that should stop it are RPC 1.3, discussed
here; RPC 3.2, discussed
here, CRCP 251.4 discussed here, and the Colorado Code of Judicial Conduct Canon 3(B)3 discussed here.
Colorado has a law against perjury which would also stop this scam. I have read that it has never been enforced in civil litigation, but never is a long time. I will eventually (2007) do a series on perjury, but I have to get much smarter on it. For now, let us just say for the sake of discussion that the criminal law against perjury is sufficiently ineffective that it would not be a deterrent to a scam involving civil litigation,
The point of this post is that there is no ethics rules deterrent that will consistently prevent a scam of any kind, even a long running scam such as the one I describe.