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Report On The Debate Over Whether There Should Be An Exception To Confidentiality For Rectifying A Crime Or Fraud, Maria Helen Bainor, Nancy Batterman
Report On The Debate Over Whether There Should Be An Exception To Confidentiality For Rectifying A Crime Or Fraud, Maria Helen Bainor, Nancy Batterman
Fordham Urban Law Journal
The Model Rules of Professional Conduct fail to provide lawyers with adequate guidance for dealing with situations in which a client has used the lawyer's services to perpetuate a fraud. He Model Rules do not discuss confidentiality in cases of client-committed fraud at all, and the provided exceptions to the confidentiality requirement do little to help attorney's deal with past frauds committed by a client with the unwitting aid of the attorney. The Model Rules should be amended to authorize disclosure of client confidences to rectify a crime or fraud when the lawyer's services have been used in the commission …
A Case For Increased Disclosure, Deborah Abramovsky
A Case For Increased Disclosure, Deborah Abramovsky
Fordham Urban Law Journal
The confidentiality rule is important but not absolute. An attorney must weigh his obligations to his client against his obligations to the profession and to the community as a whole. Reasonable certainty of the existence of potential danger should create a duty to reveal client secrets, and thus, when an attorney learns of an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm to a third party from his client, disclosure should be mandatory. This type of limited exception would not interfere with the client's constitutional rights or with the orderly administration of justice. The policy behind such an exception, i.e. …
Legal Ethics: Discretion And Utility In Model Rule 1.6, Charles A. Kelbley
Legal Ethics: Discretion And Utility In Model Rule 1.6, Charles A. Kelbley
Fordham Urban Law Journal
No other profession requires practitioners to identify so closely and completely with the interests and confidences of their clients, as in the legal profession. Unlike doctors, priests, rabbis and other professionals, the lawyer is an adviser but also an advocate. Rule 1.6 is a major flaw in the legal profession's history of self-discipline. This rule fails the test of logic because the concept of discretion which it reflects is self-contradictory. This rule is a crude form of utilitarianism and should be reformulated to require disclosure whenever clients have no right to confidentiality and their conduct would constitute unjustified aggression or …