COURSE DESCRIPTION
Ethics rules, the principles of professionalism, and sanctionable conduct are interrelated. Lawyers have a duty to zealously represent their clients, but they do not have a duty to engage in offensive conduct that may be desired by clients. Lawyers have duties of confidentiality and honesty, but those duties do not always require pressing every advantage, such as when the lawyer knows that opposing counsel has made a material drafting error in a transactional document. In these and many other scenarios, ethics rules, professionalism, and potentially sanctionable conduct subtly interact. This program will provide you with a practical guide to professionalism for the ethical lawyer.
- Interrelationship of ethics rules, professionalism, and sanctions
- Zealous representation v. needlessly embarrassing an adversary or third-party
- Reacting to an adversary’s drafting errors in transactional documents
- Ethics, professionalism, and inadvertent transmission of communications
- Duty to supervise and train subordinate lawyers and staff, including to ensure courtesy to clients, opposing counsel, and courts
- Offering candid advice to clients and withdrawal when they demand offensive conduct
- Avoiding discrimination and bigotry
Speaker:
Thomas E. Spahn is a partner in the Tysons Corners, Virginia office of McGuireWoods, where he advises firm clients on professional responsibility issues and properly creating and preserving the attorney-client privilege and work product protections. He has served on the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, and is a Member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation. He has written extensively on attorney-client privilege, ethics and other topics, and has spoken at over 1,800 CLE programs throughout the U.S. and in several foreign countries. Through links on his website biography, he has made available to the public his summaries of over 1,600 Virginia and ABA legal ethics opinions, organized by topic; a 300 page summary of his two-volume 1,500 page book on the attorney-client privilege and work product doctrine; over 900 weekly email alerts about privilege and work product cases; and materials for 40 ethics programs on numerous topics, totaling over 9,000 pages of analysis. Mr. Spahn graduated magna cum laude from Yale University and received his J.D. from Yale Law School.