Law Commons^™

Although the U.S. Supreme Court as far back as the 1981 case of Wood v. Georgia[1] identified the inherent conflict of interest that exists when an employer controls its employee’s counsel, until now, no uniform solution has existed to protect the employee’s rights in these situations.

Currently, a single attorney, as in Wood, may often represent both the corporation[2] and the corporation’s employees.  The employer can control the employee’s defense because agency law recognizes only that the interests of the principal—the employer—are at stake.[3]  Under agency law, the employer controls the defense because it may …

This is a slide-show presentation of my Intracorporate Conspiracy Trap article.

To address multi-dimensional conflict of interest problems in directors and officers (D&O) indemnification cases, we propose a solution that was originally developed for civil insurance cases in California, but that has an even more powerful and appropriate application in the context of criminal employee defendants.

Corporate crime costs the United States a staggering $600 billion a year. By contrast, the total cost of all non-corporate crime in 2001 from robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft combined was $17.2 billion; less than one-third of what fraudulent activities at the single company of Enron cost investors, pensioners, and employees in the …