The ABA comes through with another quality ethics opinion.

So, nearly everything is awful these days. Finding something interesting enough to avoid highlighting the awfulness around us is not altogether easy. This is pretty much too traumatic and damning to write about. Dwelling on this would just be petty at this point.

Coming through as a light at the end of the tunnel today is ABA Formal Ethics Opinion 494 released by the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility addressing a decent topic.

The topic – what are an attorney’s obligations that can arise from personal relationships with opposing counsel? Patterned a bit, as it explicitly acknowledges, on a recent Formal Ethics Opinion regarding judicial personal relationships with lawyers (Formal Opinion 488), Formal Opinion 494 hits all of the correct notes for dealing with this issue.

Most importantly, it appropriately centers the analysis where it fits in the Model Rules: it is an issue involving RPC 1.7(a)(2) – material limitation conflicts arising from a lawyer’s own personal interests. The opinion stresses that ordinarily such conflicts are not imputed to others at the firm. And it lays out reasonable categories to help guide lawyers in their thinking about these issues.

It also makes the point that while, most of the time, the obligation on the lawyer is disclosure to the client and moving forward only if the client is willing to waive the conflict, there can be situations where the conflict is, itself, not waivable.

The opinion posits a relationship between two lawyers that is so close that the lawyer could never get comfortable filing a well-founded motion for sanctions against the other lawyer on behalf of a client as an example of a situation where the conflict may not even be waivable.

And that entire genre of thought has, over the years, been very helpful to me in talking lawyers through situations, both in their real practice, and just as an educational tool at seminars. I, like many other ethics CLE speakers, have used lots of hypotheticals to tease out ethics issues and one that has always been fun to discuss involves something like this scenario:

You are at lunch with opposing counsel on an appellate matter who is a close friend and former colleague. Unprompted, he says, “I bet you can’t wait to see what I’ve got in store for you in my response brief. Well, you’ll have to wait a bit because I’m going to take every day allowed for me before filing so you won’t get your hands on it until a week from tomorrow.” You know, because you just checked it before coming here, that his deadline for his brief is actually tomorrow. What do you say?

This scenario usually prompts a good discussion and there is always someone in the crowd willing to say that they would tell their friend to, at least, go back and double check their math on the deadline. The problem, of course, is that doing that without first talking to your client to get approval would be extremely ethically dicey. The easiest way to drive that point home to lawyers is to ask them if, since the personal relationship with opposing counsel is so important to them, they secured informed consent from their client at the outset with respect to how the lawyer’s personal interest in their close friendship with opposing counsel could materially limit the representation.

Formal Opinion 494 is a well-done explanation of this same concept as well as something that offers a more formal set of guiding principles for determining whether disclosure to a client may be required. The full opinion is worth a read.

Is it perfect? No. It is infuriating in one respect. It is dated July 29, 2020 but was only released today, October 7, 2020.

We are all struggling with linear time these days. The last thing we need is the ABA trying to gaslight us about what month it is. Plus, if they are going to do that, you might as well go full bore and date Formal Opinion 494 as having been issued on the 221st day of March 2020.