Lizzy McLellan of the Legal Intelligencer has written an article about a fascinating lawyer-whistleblower case now pending before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
The General Counsel of a nonprofit organization apparently believed that the organization's assets were being unlawfully diverted. According to redacted filings available on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court website [go to http://www.pacourts.us/courts/supreme-court/court-opinions/ and search for "145 MAP 2014"], the General Counsel disclosed allegedly confidential information to Pennsylvania's Attorney General, and that office apparently opened an investigation of the organization. During that investigation, the General Counsel continued to represent the organization, allegedly negotiating with the government "on behalf of the targets on whom she had purported to blow the whistle." She also filed her own complaint against the organization, but the nature of that complaint -- like many of the details of this case -- are under seal.
Among the issues in this case are:
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whether this General Counsel complied with Pennsylvania's (pre-Sarbanes-Oxley version of) Rule 1.13 by seeking a second opinion or going up the organizational ladder;
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whether she violated Pennsylvania's Rule 1.6 by disclosing confidential information to the Pennsylvania Attorney General;
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whether Pennsylvania's common law fiduciary-exception to lawyers’ confidentiality duty (allowing a lawyer for a private trust to disclose information to the trust’s beneficiary) also allows a lawyer for a nonprofit charitable organization to disclose information about wrongdoing to Pennsylvania’s Attorney General;
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how a government office should handle apparently confidential information that it receives from a lawyer-whistleblower.
On that last issue, appellants assert that in this case, the government office "did not shield itself; worse still, [it] did not even spot the issue. [It] has no policy regarding dealing with attorneys as whistleblowers and in fact actively pursued [REDACTED] documents [REDACTED] before issuing its subpoenas."