Did Warren practice law without a license?
William Jacobson:
Jacobson has been a persistent critic of Warren on other issues including her claim of native American heritage. It will be interesting to see what her response will be. She will probably have a faculty full of lawyers trying to defend this particular conduct. But Jacobson is also a law professor in New York states so I suspect he has a good handle on what is required.
Usually there is an exception for out of state lawyers if there is an in state lawyer as co-counsel, but in those cases the out of state lawyer gives his home office address on the pleadings and his co-counsel gives the in state address. I suspect what happened in these cases is that Warren perceived that her briefs would look more persuasive if she gave her Harvard Law School faculty address. It is also possible that she no longer had an address in the state in which she was licensed.
The debate last Thursday night between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren covered ground mostly known to voters.
But there was one subject most people watching probably did not know about, Elizabeth Warren’s private legal representation of The Travelers Insurance Company in an asbestos-related case.
Brown brought the point up late in the debate, and hammered it:Warren attempted to deny her role, and referred to a Boston Globe article, but the Globe articlesupports Brown’s account. The Globe article indicated the representation was for a period of three years and Warren was paid $212,000. The case resulted in a Supreme Court victory for Travelers arising out of a bankruptcy case in New York.
Whatever the political implications of the exchange, Warren’s representation of Travelers raises another big potential problem for Warren.
Warren represented not just Travelers, but numerous other companies starting in the late 1990s working out of and using her Harvard Law School office in Cambridge, which she listed as her office of record on briefs filed with various courts. Warren, however, never has been licensed to practice law in Massachusetts.
...There is much more.
Jacobson has been a persistent critic of Warren on other issues including her claim of native American heritage. It will be interesting to see what her response will be. She will probably have a faculty full of lawyers trying to defend this particular conduct. But Jacobson is also a law professor in New York states so I suspect he has a good handle on what is required.
Usually there is an exception for out of state lawyers if there is an in state lawyer as co-counsel, but in those cases the out of state lawyer gives his home office address on the pleadings and his co-counsel gives the in state address. I suspect what happened in these cases is that Warren perceived that her briefs would look more persuasive if she gave her Harvard Law School faculty address. It is also possible that she no longer had an address in the state in which she was licensed.
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