Law Commons^™

Corporate Attorney-Client Privilege In The Digital Age: War On Two Fronts?, Tom Spahn

Tom Spahn

Is the corporate attorney-client privilege under attack? Many attorneys and commentators contend not only that yes, it is, but also that this battle rages on two fronts. First, they argue that courts are engaging in a misguided erosion of the privilege when faced with expansive electronic discovery. And second, they insist that policies exercised by executive agencies are chilling compliance conversations within corporations by creating a coercive “culture of privilege waiver.”

2006 and 2007 represented landmark years for the corporate attorney-client privilege. In those years, the District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana used methodology in In re Vioxx …

Law Firms Competing On The "Edge Of Chaos": Pro Bono's Role In A Winning Competitive Strategy, Tom Spahn

Tom Spahn

My Article takes an interdisciplinary approach to arguing that robust pro bono practices can give law firms a strategic advantage in the modern economy. I use modern economic theories, from game theory to complexity theory, to consider a pro bono practice’s role in responding to both internal and external competitive pressures. This leads to several key insights, such as pro bono’s ability to offset the dead-weight loss incurred when oligopolistic firms merge, its power to cause a paredo improvement to a firm’s position by moving it away from a non-cooperative Nash equilibrium, and the iterative recombination effect that such a …