COURSE DESCRIPTION
Disqualification standards have their roots in conflicts of interests. When an attorney has a conflict that rises to a certain level, he or she is disqualified from representing a certain party in litigation. Though ethics rules substantially overlap with disqualification standards, those standards do not follow traditional conflicts analysis in every detail. Indeed, the relationship between conflicts of interest (and related confidentiality concerns) and disqualification is highly nuanced, varying depending on facts of each case. There are also substantial issues in the context of joint representations, including whether the disqualification of one attorney necessarily disqualifies co-counsel. This program will provide you with a practical guide to attorney ethics rules and their relationship to disqualification in litigation.
- Attorney ethics, conflicts of interest, and disqualification standards
- How ethics rules and disqualification standards overlap and vary from each other
- Ethics standards and tests for obtaining – or defending against disqualification
- Joint representations and disqualification – if co-counsel is disqualified, are you?
- Screening for conflicts of interest and the risk of imputation of conflicts/disqualification to other attorneys
- Ethical sanctions and their relationship to disqualification
Speaker:
Thomas E. Spahn is of counsel 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 2200 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 1100 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.