Later today I will have the honor of speaking as part of a panel at the TBA Health Law Forum. The other panelists are Sheree Wright, the Senior Associate General Counsel with Vanderbilt University and Bill Hannah a lawyer in Chattanooga with the Chambliss Bahner firm. I’m fortunate enough to have both Sheree and Bill as members of the TBA Ethics Committee I chair and am very excited to spend a couple of hours talking with them and the crowd about ethics issues near and dear to Health Care lawyers. We’ll be talking about “The Ethics of the Distracted Lawyer.” If you happen to be in the Franklin/Cool Springs part of Tennessee, you probably still might be able to work your way into the venue to register and attend.
As indicated in the title of the post, the only other thing I’m going to discuss today also is a topic that really is relevant only to Tennessee lawyers (but to a larger segment of that group, then the people that might actually contemplate a last minute visit to the above-highlighted seminar.)
I’ve now gotten enough inquiries over the last several weeks about the revised state-of-play in Tennessee state court litigation when it comes to attorney’s conferring with deponents during breaks in a deposition that it likely makes sense to write about it to have another handy link to send to folks that ask for a recollection refresher.
Whether such arrangements are kosher or not is subject to significant variance in various jurisdictions. Perhaps the original case staking out the notion that an attorney’s communication with a client/deponent during a deposition was not a privileged communication is Hall v. Clifton Precision,150 F.R.D. 525 (E.D. Pa. 1993). I’ve done quite few CLEs over the years where I used one hypothetical or another to tease out the situation and to lead the audience into a discussion about whether the lawyer taking the deposition can successfully force disclosure of what was said to the witness by another lawyer during a break. The general principle from which courts have concluded that no privilege applies and that the contents of such discussions can be explored is that depositions are supposed to take place in the same manner as if they were trial testimony. Karen Rubin back in 2015 delved pretty thoroughly into the state of the law on this issue at her firm’s blog here.
Tennessee has, assuming the vehicle chosen actually does the trick, created a very clear answer to this question now for cases pending in our state courts. The answer, in effect as of July 1, 2016, makes communications with a deponent during a break in the deposition perfectly appropriate, as long as: (1) there is not a question pending; and (2) the lawyer’s communication with the deponent during the break does not cross any lines so as to amount to a violation of RPC 3.3 or 3.4.
The vehicle chosen for doing this is a 2016 Advisory Commission Comment to our rule of civil procedure addressed at depositions, Tenn. R. Civ. P. 30.03 The comment provides as follows:
Rule 30.03 provides that “[e]xamination and cross-examination of witnesses may proceed as permitted at the trial under the Tennessee Rules of Evidence.” This language does not imply that Tenn. R. Evid. 615 is applicable to depositions. Unless otherwise ordered by the court, a lawyer may communicate with a deponent about deposition procedure or the substance of deposition testimony before, during (unless a question is pending) or after the deposition; however, such communications are subject to the Rules of Professional Conduct including, but not limited to, Tenn. Sup. Ct. R. 8, RPC 3.3 and RPC 3.4.
Now I don’t know exactly where an Advisory Commission Comment to a rule of procedure ranks in terms of authority and precedent as a technical matter, but there is no question that this is the latest word on this matter – words that our Court has bought into or they would have not approved the release – and, thus, a lawyer who wants to talk to their client during a deposition in our state court system no longer has to be worried about the client being forced to divulge the discussion on a claim that privilege does not apply. At least as long as there wasn’t a pending question at the time of the break and the conversation.
What lawyers will still need to be concerned about – whether the deponent is their client or not — is communications that could be construed as amounting to violations of RPC 3.3 because they involve assisting a fraud on the tribunal or that could be construed as violating RPC 3.4.
The two most obvious pieces of RPC 3.4 that a lawyer could run afoul of through coaching a deponent during a break would be:
(a) unlawfully obstruct another party’s access to evidence or unlawfully alter, destroy, or conceal a document or other material having potential evidentiary value. A lawyer shall not counsel or assist another person to do any such act; or
(b) falsify evidence, counsel or assist a witness to offer false or misleading testimony
So, still a topic that can be explored through interesting hypos at future seminars even in Tennessee.
2 replies on “A very Tennessee-specific discussion for this Friday.”
Most interesting. I wonder whether other states are doing something similar. My intense interest when I was trying cases was when could a lawyer direct his client not to answer a question. Almost everywhere, a lawyer could do this to protect the AC Privilege. But, what if privilege is not involved, but it would be manifestly unfair to allow a client to answer a truly lousy question, such as one calling for a legal conclusion? Always scary.
Thank you Bill. I don’t know the answer to whether other places are going down a path like this… FWIW, around these parts, protection of privilege has, as far as I know, been the only legitimate basis for a lawyer to instruct a client not to answer a deposition question unless you’ve obtained a protective order prior to the depo that would make certain topics off-limits