Ethical Considerations for Corporate Counsel: Who Is the Client?—Featuring Tom Spahn

A pre-recorded streaming VIDEO replay of the March 2022 webcast, Ethical Considerations for Corporate Counsel: Who Is the Client?—Featuring Tom Spahn.

Join Tom Spahn for this program using hypotheticals to explore the most basic question that all corporate in-house and outside lawyers must answer: exactly who is the “client”? Among other things, topics discussed:

• Who is the corporate lawyer’s client within the corporate entity, and whether lawyers can be retained by a constituent such as an Audit Committee or group of independent directors
• Who is the client within a corporate family, whether outside lawyers can be adverse to one corporate family member while simultaneously representing another on an unrelated matter, and whether in-house lawyers automatically represent their corporate employer’s affiliates
• The impact of client identity in corporate transactions, including ownership of the attorney-client relationship (and the accompanying privilege) in stock and asset sales, and the effect of joint representations in selling or spinning off subsidiaries
• Whether corporate in-house and outside lawyers can also represent corporate employees, the implications of such representations, and how to avoid accidentally creating such representations
• Whether corporations’ shareholders must ever be considered the corporate lawyers’ “clients,” including the fiduciary exception’s application