Welcome to your daily briefing on legal developments in Maryland. Today we're covering 5 key stories including updates on maryland legal headlines, background & context. Let's dive in.
2 stories
Records that have been expunged, shielded, or sealed by court order are not available to the public, and certain other records require a court order or special legal provision for access.
Maryland legal professionals must understand these access limitations when advising clients or handling record requests in state court proceedings.
People's Law Library of Maryland has published guidance on the process for shielding or sealing a case record.
Maryland practitioners advising clients on expungement and record-clearing matters need current, jurisdiction-specific procedural guidance.
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Client trust funds and the firm's operating funds must never commingle, even temporarily, even with the intent to "fix it later." Bar audits look for two things first: (1) any check or transfer that touches both accounts, (2) negative balances on any specific client's ledger. Both are presumptive misappropriation regardless of intent.
Trust-account violations produce some of the harshest discipline in professional regulation, including suspension and disbarment. The technicality has no defense based on good intentions.
Most non-compliance findings stem from three avoidable mistakes: claiming credit for the wrong reporting period, missing the ethics-credit minimum, and failing to retain proof of attendance for the audit lookback window (typically 5 years). State bar audits are random but increasing in frequency.
A CLE non-compliance finding is a public record in many states and triggers an administrative suspension that requires reinstatement application. Reinstatement is slower than initial admission in some jurisdictions.
A consistently followed retention policy provides a defense against spoliation claims when documents are destroyed in the ordinary course before litigation was anticipated. Without a policy, every routine deletion looks like targeted destruction in hindsight.
Adverse-inference instructions arising from spoliation routinely turn winnable cases into losses. A documented policy, consistently applied, is the cleanest defense available.
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