Insets: Tiffany West’s 12-year-old son who suffered second-degree burns on his face after an alleged prank went wrong during a sleepover (WALB/YouTube). Background: The apartment where Tiffany West’s son was burned (WALB/YouTube).

A group of young boys in Georgia, ages 12 to 15, are facing charges for allegedly dumping hot water on one of their “friends” in a sleepover prank gone wrong, according to police and the victim’s family.

“You got to be in shock to know your friends are capable of doing this to you,” the victim‘s aunt, Nachelle Austille, told local NBC and ABC affiliate WALB. “Like somebody you trusted. It’s just horrible. He never thought something like this would happen to him.”

Tiffany West, the victim’s mother, told the local station that her son, age 12, was at a sleepover at one of their neighbor’s apartments in Tifton — about 180 miles south of Atlanta — when his friends allegedly set upon him.  It’s unclear when the sleepover occurred as West is choosing to keep certain details private.

She says hearing about what happened to her son, who suffered second-degree burns on most of his face, upset her deeply.

Background: A Las Vegas intersection near where police say a shooting death occurred (Google Maps). Inset: Daisy Gonzalez (Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department/KLAS).

A Las Vegas teen is accused of spearheading a murder conspiracy by telling a group of friends that they needed to “stick to the same story” after a fatal shooting.

Daisy Gonzalez is linked to a Jan. 2 shooting at an apartment complex, Las Vegas CBS affiliate KLAS reported. Police had received a call from someone who said his neighbor, Darian Gonzalez, was shot inside his apartment and several people were seen running from the residence.

Kayla Rincon-Miller was killed in Florida. (Crime scene photo from Cape Coral Police Department; victim’s photo from GoFundMe)

Police are searching for a gunman who killed a 15-year-old girl in a street stickup as she and two friends were headed to McDonald’s after a movie night out during spring break in Florida.

Kayla Rincon-Miller was shot on Sunday night in the 2000 block of Southeast 16th Place, Cape Coral Police Chief Anthony Sizemore said at a Monday news conference.

“It should strike a nerve that a young, vibrant 15-year-old girl was shot dead in the street,” Sizemore said.

Sizemore said Kayla was killed when a car pulled up and blinded the girls with their headlights. The assailants jumped out of the car and tried to rob them. One of them began to shoot. Kayla was struck in the chest, police said.

The vehicle the shooter was in then fled south.

Left and right image: Candi Royer appears in two booking photos; center: Khaleesi Cuthriell in happier times. (Augusta County Sheriff’s Office)

A second adult has been sentenced to spend her life in prison for the murder of a Virginia toddler who was sadistically tortured for several months before being literally thrown away in early 2021.

Candi J. Royer, 44, pleaded guilty to one count of murder in the first degree in September 2023. Just days before, in late August, Travis Brown, 32, was convicted on the same charge by an Augusta County jury. Brown was also convicted of felony murder, child abuse, child cruelty, concealing a dead body, and conspiracy.

Last week, Brown was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the first-degree murder charge. He was additionally given a 20-year sentence on the child abuse charge.

“It’s never going to go well,” Arizona attorney Lynda C. Shely says about the prospect of representing anyone you are close to, including family members and friends. Shely, the immediate past chair of the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, works in private practice and has advised more than 2,500 law firms around the country on legal ethics matters.

“What friends and family don’t understand is just giving them a little bit of advice creates an attorney-client relationship,” Shely says. “And a young lawyer can be sued if the advice they give is wrong.”

A friend or family member asking for legal advice can make for a complicated situation, especially because “young lawyers typically want to flex the knowledge they learned from law school or from their limited time as a lawyer,” says Khasim Lockhart, an associate at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz in New York, whose focus areas include legal ethics and professional responsibility.

The risks of giving legal advice in these situations

The possibility of inadvertently creating an attorney-client relationship is a very real risk.

“When you start giving advice about how to deal with somebody’s particular legal problem and not just giving referrals to sources of assistance, the risk is that you are going to inadvertently create a lawyer-client relationship—because the person is going to understand you are giving them assistance about their particular problem that they can rely on,” says Bruce A. Green, the Louis Stein chair at the Fordham University School of Law, where he directs the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics. Green is the current chair of the Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility.

This may violate your duty of competence if it relates to something outside your realm of expertise under Model Rule 1.1 of the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct.

“As a young lawyer, you want to be helpful to anyone, especially family members, but at the same time, the biggest risk from helping family members is that a lawyer can end up dabbling,” Lockhart says. “What I mean by dabbling is a lawyer having limited involvement in a subject matter and giving a few pieces of advice based on general knowledge from law school or a random case they read while simultaneously trying to avoid fully engaging in the matter. But even five minutes of advice can be truly damaging.”

Ethical duties and the possibility of a malpractice claim

Shely says young lawyers should understand that even if they think they are giving just “a little bit of advice,” say on the sidelines of their kids’ soccer game to another parent, the lawyer would likely be required to put that contact in their firm’s database as a potential client and a potential conflict under Model Rule 1.18 and pursuant to their local rules that cover duties to prospective clients.

In addition to the risk of losing a friend after offering bad legal advice, a young lawyer could also be sued for malpractice.

“It happens all the time,” Shely says. “And that’s not a debt you want to take on along with student loans.” Even where your firm might have malpractice insurance, if you provide advice outside the scope of your job, it may not be covered.

How to respond when a friend or family member asks for legal advice

So what is a young lawyer who specializes in labor and employment law supposed to do when a family member comes to them with a criminal defense issue?

The best thing to do is be straightforward and say: “I have no experience in that area of law, but I can find someone for you,” Lockhart says. New lawyers and seasoned lawyers alike are familiar with other attorneys at their firms or through bar associations and can connect a family member or friend to one with the experience they need, he adds.

It’s OK to represent friends and family members, but do it the right way

If a young lawyer feels competent to represent someone close to them, there are no rules preventing that representation, but it must proceed the way that any other representation would.

“You have to do the full gamut of having them come into the office or doing a consultation virtually and sending an engagement letter,” Shely says.

She also recommends that lawyers who choose to represent a friend or family member make sure to carefully limit the scope of representation in a written engagement letter to just that matter and not agree to represent on appeal.

“Otherwise,” Shely says, “that friend or family member could mistakenly think you’re going to handle all of their legal matters for free!”

Lockhart also notes that although representing a friend or family member might feel a bit more relaxed and laid-back than a more formal representation, the ABA Model Rules still apply.

“You don’t want to assume you will be more favored by a family member or friend if something goes south,” he says.

Editor’s Note: This column first appeared in the ABA Young Lawyers Division publication TYL on Oct. 13, 2023.

Samuel Dangremond is an attorney admitted to the Connecticut, Florida and New York bars. He works as a trusts and estates associate at Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle in New York City.

Mind Your Business is a series of columns written by lawyers, legal professionals and others within the legal industry. The purpose of these columns is to offer practical guidance for attorneys on how to run their practices, provide information about the latest trends in legal technology and how it can help lawyers work more efficiently, and strategies for building a thriving business.

Interested in contributing a column? Send a query to [email protected].

This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.