The VLW Blog

The Virginia State Bar will close its Alexandria office when its lease expires in September 2009.
VSB Executive Director Karen A. Gould said the closing will save about $200,000 a year. The office has four attorneys and two support staff who prosecute lawyer disciplinary cases.
The attorneys in the office have been given an option of teleworking […]

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What if the bank in which an attorney has his trust account goes under? As a general rule, if the account is set up properly, each of the attorney’s clients has $100,000 of FDIC protection, even if the trust account holds substantially more than that.
It gets much more complicated, as Virginia State Bar Ethics Counsel […]

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Payee notification of insurance checks and random audits of trust accounts are two proposals under active study as the Virginia State Bar this month convened a meeting to deal solely with protecting the public from dishonest lawyers.
As we reported last month, recent attorney defalcations in Virginia have been costly to clients and others.  The damage […]

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The Virginia State Bar is seeking comments to the proposal that all active VSB members engaged in the private practice of law representing clients (either individuals or entities) drawn from the general public be covered under a professional liability (malpractice) insurance policy.  The linked page includes a link to the text of the proposal.
By Peter […]

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Irving M. Blank, a Richmond attorney and member of the Virginia State Bar executive committee, has announced that he is running for president-elect of the VSB.
VSB bylaws require candidates for the position to submit a petition with the names of 50 attorneys by Oct. 1. The bylaws also require the candidate to have been an […]

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The Supreme Court of Virginia has told the Virginia State Bar not to put any information about disciplinary complaints on its Web site “until a decision has been made adverse to the lawyer and the the time for filing an appeal from that decision to the Supreme Court has expired.”
“The Supreme Court would like this […]

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Judy Rosenblatt wanted her colleagues on the executive committee of the Virginia State Bar to send a letter to General Assembly members stating the committee’s displeasure at the failure of the legislature to fill judicial vacancies.
Almost 30 appointments are pending, but Rosenblatt was most upset yesterday about Court of Appeals Judges Robert J. Humphreys and […]

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The CRESPA bond requirement is being increased, according to this announcement from the Virginia State Bar.
An amendment to Code § 6.1-2.21 increasing the minimum CRESPA surety bond from $100,000 to $200,000 will be effective on July 1, 2008.
UPDATE: Here’s an update on Thursday afternoon, direct from the VSB Executive Committee which is meeting in Smithfield. […]

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George A. Chabalewski, the head of the Virginia State Bar’s disciplinary system since June 2006, has submitted his resignation, effective July 9.
Chabalewski joined the bar staff after 20 years as a civil litigator in the Virginia attorney general’s office. He had worked earlier as a prosecutor and public defender in Kane County, Ill.
In an e-mail […]

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The Virginia State Bar will seek comments on a proposal for mandatory legal malpractice insurance for attorneys who represent clients drawn from the public.
The VSB executive committee and council will get the proposal as an informational item at their meetings next week and is expected to vote on the proposal at its June 19 annual […]

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