COURSE DESCRIPTION
Paralegals are often essential for lawyers to successfully practice law. Paralegals conduct basic legal research, help review and prepare documents, and sometimes screen clients. Still, they are not lawyers and not directly subject to the ethics rules applicable to lawyers. But the lawyers who supervise their work are responsible for their actions and liable for any improper conduct. Lawyers are responsible for ensuring that their paralegals’ work conforms to ethics rules. If a paralegal’s actions breach client confidentiality, compromise the attorney-client privilege, or are otherwise improper, the supervising lawyer is ethically responsible for that misconduct. This program will provide you with a practical guide to how ethics rules make supervising lawyers responsible for the actions of their paralegals.
- Conflicts of interest and the attribution of paralegal knowledge about client matters
- Determining when paralegal research and document preparation becomes the unauthorized practice of law
- How paralegals must be instructed about client confidentiality – and lawyer consequences on breach
- Attorney-client privilege implications when clients communicate with paralegals – and risk of inadvertent disclosure
- Issues when paralegals participate in discovery
- Fee sharing with paralegals
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.