COURSE DESCRIPTION
Lawyers advising businesses on transactions or negotiating on their behalf often confront a range of important ethical questions. The biggest is, who is your client? Often a company’s owners or managers will not understand the distinction between representing them and representing the company? There are also issues of identifying and clearing conflicts among clients when they are negotiating transaction. And what can a lawyer say or do when negotiating for a client? Also, lawyers are sometimes confronted with issues about what to do when clients are dishonest. This program will provide you with a real world guide to ethical issues when representing clients in business transactions.
- Ethical issues in business and corporate practice
- Identifying your client in a variety of transactional contexts – the company v. its managers?
- Conflicts of interest in representing both sides of a transaction
- Ethical issues in transactional negotiations and communications with represented parties
- Representing clients you know to be dishonest and reporting wrong-doing “up and out”
Speakers:
Thomas E. Spahn is a partner in the McLean, Virginia office of McGuireWoods, LLP, where he has a substantial practice advising clients on properly creating and preserving the attorney-client privilege and work product protections. For more than 30 years he has lectured extensively on legal ethics and professionalism and has written “The Attorney-Client Privilege and the Work Product Doctrine: A Practitioner’s Guide,” a 750 page treatise published by the Virginia Law Foundation. Mr. Spahn has served as a member of the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility and as a member of the Virginia State Bar's Legal Ethics Committee.
William Freivogel is the principal of Freivogel Ethics Consulting and is an independent consultant to law firms on ethics and risk management. He was a trial lawyer for 22 years and has practiced in the areas of legal ethics and lawyer malpractice for more than 25 years. He is chair of the Editorial Board of the ABA/BNA Lawyers’ Manual on Professional Conduct. He maintains the Website“Freivogel on Conflicts” at www.freivogelonconflicts.com<http://www.freivogelonconflicts.com/> .