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Lawyer Ethics and Email (Live Replay from June 17, 2020)

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Description

Law practice without email is difficult to imagine. Clients and courts not only use it but expect lawyers to use it for communications. But email comes with a host of substantial ethical issues.

  • Is email secure?
  • Can it be used to – even inadvertently – create an attorney-client relationship?
  • How does email impact the attorney-client privilege?
  • What about email conversations with a represented adversary?
  • How can confidentiality and other ethical duties be satisfied when law firms almost always work with outside vendors to provide email?

These and other substantial ethical questions are discussed in this practical guide to the ethical issues when lawyers use email in their practices.

  • Beginning an attorney relationship via email – intentionally and inadvertently
  • Effect on attorney-client privilege when using a vendor for email
  • Discarding/deleting email and working with outside vendors
  • Ex parte communications with represented adversaries
  • Corporate counsel issues – in-house creation of documents, legal v. business advice
  • Inadvertently sent email and metadata embedded in email

Contributors

  • Thomas E. Spahn

    Thomas E. Spahn is a partner in the McLean, Virginia office of McGuireWoods, LLP, where he has a broad complex commercial, business and securities litigation practice. He also has a substantial practice advising businesses on properly creating and preserving the attorney-client privilege and work product protections. For more than 20 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 member of the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility and as a member of the Virginia State Bar's Legal Ethics Committee. He received his B.A., magna cum laude, from Yale University and his J.D. from Yale Law School

    Click here for more information about Thomas.

April 30, 2021
Fri 1:00 PM EDT

Duration 1H 0M

This live web event has ended.

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