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The annual sprint to name new "Official Emblems and Designations" of the Commonwealth is underway in the General Assembly.

A fee agreement with a client that provides that any advanced money is nonrefundable would be prohibited under a proposed amendment to Rule 1.5 of the Rules of Professional Conduct.

Hold on, you may ask, hasn’t this always been the case?

And if you really are on top of things, you may ask, didn’t the Virginia State Bar issue a Legal Ethics Opinion 30 years ago finding “nonrefundable retainers” or other such arrangements for advanced fees to be unethical?

Quite a few American presidents have traveled to Hot Springs, Virginia, to relax at The Homestead resort.

But two had the chance, before they took office, to travel to The Homestead for a vacation respite – and to address the Summer Meeting of The Virginia Bar Association.

Every state has such designations, and a number of the items in our Code actually make sense for Virginia: The official bird, for example, is the cardinal. And the official tree (and flower) is the dogwood. The official pony – with a hat tip to Misty – is the Chincoteague pony.

In his 2005 confirmation hearing, U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts famously promised that his job on the Supreme Court would be “to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”

His baseball analogy was apt: If you look around, you’ll see that the game of baseball and law practice have many similarities.