Legal Opinion Standards Committee

text goes here

This is intended to bring everyone up to date on events that have transpired since we held our Committee’s organizational meeting on August 11, 2006.

At our organizational meeting, our Committee agreed to the following goals and objectives for this project:

• Create normative legal opinion standards that reflect current opinion practices in Florida (what opinion-givers should be prepared to give and what opinion-recipients should be prepared to accept);

• Create a practice manual for use by Florida attorneys supportive of a model form of legal opinion that Florida lawyers can use in their opinion-giving practices. The practice manual should provide Florida practitioners with guidance about what the Committee believes, on an opinion-by-opinion basis, are the normative opinions that should be acceptable in most commercial transactions, what those normative opinions mean and what the opinion-giver is expected to do in order to give each normative opinion. The practice manual should be written in plain English; and

• Create guidelines that assist Florida counsel in both intrastate and interstate transactions.

Additionally, at our organizational meeting we circulated an outline of the proposed sections of our revised report. Following the meeting, we received comments on the outline from several committee members, and in that regard, a current draft of the outline is attached. We would appreciate further comments to the draft outline, which we believe remains a work-in-progress.

Further, following our meeting we began an active discussion with members of the legal opinion standards committee of the Real Property, Probate and Trust Law (RPPTL) Section about the possibility of making this project a joint project of both the Business Law Section and the RPPTL section. We are pleased to report that the RPPTL section legal opinions standards committee has agreed to join us in our efforts, and this project is now a joint project of both sections. In our opinion (no pun intended, of course), this is a very exciting development because it represents the opportunity (if we are successful) to create normative opinion standards that ought to be acceptable to Florida business lawyers in virtually all types of business transactions.

At this time, four members of the RPPTL section’s legal opinions committee have joined the three of us as the steering committee for this project. As a steering committee, we have begun the process of preparing first drafts of various sections of the proposed report, including the proposed form of opinion. Our goal is to transmit to the Committee sometime in early November the materials that will be considered at our next Committee meeting.

While we had originally scheduled our next meeting to be held on October 20, 2006, we have concluded that we will not be ready for that meeting. As a result, we are planning the next meeting for Friday, November 17, 2006. Details regarding that meeting will be forthcoming later this month.

Also, we have posted on our Section website (on our Committee’s page) and on the legal opinions committee page of the RPPTL section’s website copies of our 1991 legal opinion standards report, the RPPTL Sections’ 1996 and 2004 legal opinion standards reports, our 1998 secured transaction opinions report and several state bar and ABA reports on legal opinion practices. We hope you find these materials helpful.

Finally, we want to encourage all Florida business attorneys who have an interest to join our Committee. We had a wonderful start on August 11, when 20 participants joined us for our organizational meeting. They represented many of Florida’s large firms, as well as several midsized and small firms. We are also aware of others who have told us they intend to participate in this project, but couldn’t make our organizational meeting. Notwithstanding, the success of our efforts will in part be measured by our reaching consensus on normative opinion practices, and the larger the group that participates in this project the more likely we will be successful in reaching a consensus that everyone accepts. If you have an interest in this project, we hope that you will consider joining our Committee.

Again, we appreciate everyone’s involvement and look forward to seeing each of you on Friday, November 17, 2006.

If you have any questions, please feel free to give me a call.

Philip B.Schwartz, Chair

Robert W. Barron, Co-Vice Chair

J.C. Ferrer, Co-Vice Chair

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!