Here's the issue spotter from my Fall 2007 course at UC-Berkeley.
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You’re a third year associate at Stacy Brent & Associates. The sole partner, Stacy Brent, left you this voicemail:
“I’m in trial representing a British citizen, Nehal Mehta, in a civil fraud suit against Monterey Finance (MF). Yesterday morning, MF’s lawyer, Jo Solti, said that MF had just been acquired by Monterey Bank (MB) and that MB should be substituted in as the defendant. Well, MB either was or is a client! They haven’t sent us work in a while, but have sent us many projects over the years. Then the Internal Revenue Service served me with a subpoena demanding that I produce any client files reflecting Mehta’s finances. I am sure that Solti put the IRS up to it. Solti said that a treaty between the US and the United Kingdom allows the UK to demand that the IRS subpoena any information relevant to terrorist financing. Can you believe it? Solti’s been trying to insinuate a terrorist financing theme into the trial when it’s completely false. Anyway, identify the ethics issues on all that and we'll talk.
“Brook Hutz telephoned -- again. Originally, I didn’t even want Hutz as a client. When a solo practitioner in town, Leslie Sanchez, had a massive stroke, lots of clients went abandoned. That’s why Hutz sought me out. Hutz pays my legal bills grudgingly. Thank goodness I got a lien on Hutz’s house in the fee agreement. Have a non-lawyer staff person let Hutz know that I’ll call back when I’m out of trial. There’s nothing happening in Hutz’s case—well, actually, Judge Van Falk recently transmitted some of the pleadings to a grand jury investigating the lawyer for Hutz’s opponent. But the court ordered us not to tell our clients about it.
“On another matter, when reading the newspaper this morning I realized I need some ethics research done. We represented Alex Adams in negotiations to sell a parcel of land to the county—well, actually, Adams dad, who’s really wealthy, paid the fees. I told the county’s lawyers that Adams wouldn’t take less than $2.6 million. The county’s lawyers didn’t trust Adams and wanted to hear some facts about the parcel “straight from the lawyer’s mouth.” So I gave them some factual representations about the land, which I believed were true. Then I discovered that Adams wasn’t disclosing that the land is downhill from a toxic waste site! I found that morally repugnant and so I gave Adams a moral scolding and when that didn’t work I terminated Adams as a client. But while reading about the possible sale today, I realized that some of my comments to the county lawyers may have been false or misleading. I can’t do anything about that now, can I?
“Anyway, get back to me and after work we can grab dinner and drinks at Happy Jacks.”
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Only the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct apply. Spot issues arising in this fact pattern, identify the governing rules and/or comment paragraphs, and analyze the issues to the extent the time limits permit.
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This is a test comment. Due to a huge increase in spam comments, we've had to add a verifier. Sorry about the inconvenience.
Posted by: John Steele | February 03, 2008 at 02:21 PM