Legal Ethics Forum

Welcome, Nona-Friends

Hello to all the knitters from my wife's knitting blog!  She was kind enough to link to this site, to help redress the fact that her knitting blog gets 5x the readers my legal ethics blog does -- go figure.  Are there any ethical conflicts in knitting?  The comments section is open.

This Happens More Often Than Is Reported

News accounts of lawyers, including ones on this blog, tilt heavily to lawyer-gone-bad stories.  So these stories (reg reqd) are welcome. 

"When prosecutor Paul Cummins retires this summer, attorneys say, the San Francisco district attorney's office will lose a longtime mentor and the criminal defense bar a trusted liaison.    ....   

"Cummins has long been the 'unofficial liaison' between the defense bar and the DA's office, said [defense attorney] Rappaport, who praised the prosecutor as professional, open-minded and exceedingly fair." 

Ex-Governor McGreevey Withdraws from Legal Work

Conflict of interest accusations have prompted New Jersey's former Governor, James McGreevey, to withdraw from an attorney-client representation of developers.  (NYT; reg reqd)  The situation is apparently leading to tighter rules on conflicts of interest for ex-Governors.

Public Defender Workloads

Don Herzog, at Left2Right, looks at public defender workloads -- which can be as high as 484 cases per PD.

Professors: Are you tempted to Avoid Jury Duty?

Federal Judge Hittner ordered a professor to sit in a jury assembly room for 10 days or spend 10 days in jail when the professor skipped out on jury duty. Thanks to my colleague George Dix for the source.

Erosion of Privilege?

Christine Hurt, at Conglomerate, has posted about how the new climate of business and legal ethics can drive a wedge between a corporation and its officers, directors, and agents.  Here's the executive summary and a news story (reg req'd) about the Association of Corporate Counsel's new survey, "Is the Attorney-Client Privilege under Attack?"  The ACC is not a disinterested party in this debate but, then again, neither are the SEC or DOJ.  As I've said before, the sky isn't falling, but we may have the makings of a tragedy of the commons. 

Reading List on Conflicts of Interest?

What books would you recommend on conflicts of interest, both generally and in the legal profession?  Here are a few of my suggestions.  Please add more in the comments.

Andrew Stark, Conflict of Interest in American Public Life.

Janine Griffiths-Baker, Serving Two Masters: Conflicts of Interest in the Modern Law Firm (UK focus)

Michael Davis & Andrew Stark (eds.)  Conflict of Interest in the Professions

Susan Shapiro, Tangled Loyalties: Conflict of Interest in Legal Practice

Peter Morgan & Glenn Reynolds, The Appearance of Impropriety

Charles Hollander (Q.C.) & Simon Salzedo, Conflicts of Interest and Chinese Walls (UK focus)

Quick Hits (4/27)

A Wayne, New Jersey lawyer denies accusations that he helped a client hide assets.  From the news account, that appears to be a bare-knuckle fight.    . . . .     A critic of New Mexico's lawyer discipline system says that the "three prime defects discrediting attorney disciplinary systems [are] secrecy, leniency and delay."    . . . .     A Korean newspaper, the JoongAng Daily, reports that "[c]ivic groups are raising concerns that former high-level government officials working as highly paid advisers at law and accounting firms are wielding their influence behind the scenes on behalf of their firms' clients."    . . . .     The House reversed ethics rules that many felt had been passed for the benefit of Tom DeLay.

VC Conflicts of Interest

A VC blog discusses conflicts of interest for venture capitalists.  (Hat tip to Gordon Smith, at  Conglomerate.)

Early Buzz Favors Andersen

Prelimary reports (from the Associated Press and the SCOTUS blog) are that the government's position in the prosecution of Arthur Andersen for obstruction of justice took a real drubbing in the Supreme Court oral argument today.  The government argued that a company should preserve documents when there is a "reasonable possibility of an impending inquiry."  Note that this is the standard for imposing sanctions for spoliation of evidence, but it's a real stretch to import that standard into the criminal law governing obstruction of justice.  My recollection from the last time I looked at these cases is that for document destruction to constitute obstruction of justice, there must be inter alia a pending proceeding, not just a reasonably possible one.  In-house lawyer Nancy Temple's e-mail reminding Andersen auditors to comply with the firm's document destruction/retention policy could not constitute obstruction of justice in advance of a formal investigatory proceeding.  (When the SEC finally did launch a formal probe, Andersen immediately stopped shredding documents.) 

Andersen did a lot of things wrong in its work on various Enron matters, but ironically the act for which it was indicted and convicted was probably not one of them.