A real estate broker in the state of Texas has done a great deal of work to not only be licensed to buy or sell real estate on behalf of clients, but to own their own firm that is worked by other licensees. In fact, real estate licensees cannot sell or buy real estate on their own—they must be sponsored by a licensed broker. In the state of Texas, real estate licenses—both for brokers and...
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When you have worked hard to earn your real estate license, a rewarding career is in the offing. The last thing you want to do is to endanger your livelihood by putting that license at risk of being revoked. Any accusation against your license should be met with a vigorous defense. That includes when someone has complained that you have engaged in misrepresentation by failing to disclose important facts about a property. A real estate...
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Mistakes in any profession can proceed from becoming overworked—and those in professions with “crunch times,” many of whom perhaps make the bulk of their yearly income during a certain time of year, are at particular risk for accidentally violating best practices or for being wrongfully accused of doing so. For some CPAs, this season is tax season—harvest time for the Texas State Board of Public Accountancy. While there are a number of breaches of best...
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Student loan debt has been in the news a lot for the past few years, as the cost of getting a higher education has skyrocketed well beyond the rate of salary inflation. Unfortunately, for quite a while a number of states—including Texas—have had laws on the books that permit licensing agencies to strip professionals of their licenses if they fall behind on payments of their student loans. Our state’s Sunset Advisory Commission back in 1988...
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As an attorney, you have put in a considerable amount of time and energy toward becoming a licensed professional, including law school and passing the Texas Bar Exam. Being accused of a crime risks losing all that you have worked so hard for. Yet when an attorney has been charged with a crime, particularly a crime that the State Bar has determined to be one whose commission is germane to a lawyer’s fitness to practice...
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It’s a hot topic in society at the moment: the over-prescription of medications. With deaths due to abuse of prescription painkillers occurring at a troubling rate—and even attributed in popular media to the death of the television character Roseanne Connors—it makes sense for our governments to keep an eye on what’s going on. But, as so often happens with any high-profile issue of grave public concern, it is far too easy for things to fall...
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The concept of “minimum standard of care” has gone a long way toward causing damage to the livelihood of many Texas dentists. Particularly where the standards of care as established in guiding documents are murky or unclear, dentists can find themselves being held to what appeared to be only recommendations, with their livelihoods on the line. The minimum standard of care is a legal concept that basically describes the quality and type of treatment that...
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Ever since the days of Hippocrates—who included in his famous physician’s oath the words, “In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing and all seduction, and especially from the pleasures of love with women or with men […]” — the concept of improper relationships in doctor-patient interactions has been a topic of concern. In today’s society, we may be seeing...
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While the Texas Medical Board, like other medical boards across the nation, has been established with the explicit goal of promoting and ensuring patient safety, there are times its actions go too far. A state’s citizens are safest when the state has a proper ratio of fully-practicing physicians to the number of potential patients. Which is to say, where disciplinary actions taken by medical boards serve to either dissuade qualified professionals from becoming practicing physicians...
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Every medical professional will, in the course of performing their profession, encounter patients who are, for lack of a better term, manipulative. Often these cases will involve either people who are in search of attention via misguided means, or perhaps (in a distressing sign of our times) attempting to get their hands on excess or unnecessary narcotic medications. The problem is that manipulative people may go to extremes in order to get what they want—up...
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