LIVE REPLAY: Lawyer Ethics and Email

course

COURSE INFO

  • Presentation Date 4/30/2021
  • Next Class Time 12:00 PM CT
  • Duration 60 min.
  • Format Audio Webcast
  • Program Code 07172020d
  • Ethics Credits 1 hour(s)


Course Price: $65.00
ADD TO CART

COURSE 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 will be 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

 

Speaker:

Thomas 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.  He received his B.A., magna cum laude, from Yale University and his J.D. from Yale Law School.