COURSE DESCRIPTION
Technology allows lawyers far more flexibility to practice law than ever before. Lawyers can work in shared offices, splitting expenses with other small firms or solo practitioners. They can work remotely, from home or virtually anywhere, with basic computer and networking technology. But all these innovations come with ethics traps. These include issues of communications and confidentiality, supervising outsourced worked, multijurisdictional practice, and managing all the technology used to practice law from home. This program will provide you with a practical guide to ethical issues when working from home or anywhere but a traditional office.
- Disclosure to clients of virtual nature of law office
- Duty of competence as a duty to understand technology
- Electronic communications, confidentiality, and ethical risks in virtual law offices
- How Web sites and a “virtual” presence implicate multijurisdictional practice issues
- Outsourcing work to paralegal services, including fee sharing issues
Speaker:
Thomas E. Spahn is a partner in the McLean, Virginia office of McGuireWoods, LLP, where he has a broad complex commercial, business and securities litigation practice. He also has a substantial practice advising businesses on properly creating and preserving the attorney-client privilege and work product protections. For more than 20 years he has lectured extensively on legal ethics and professionalism and has written “The Attorney-Client Privilege and the Work Product Doctrine: A Practitioner’s Guide,” a 750 page treatise published by the Virginia Law Foundation. Mr. Spahn has served as member of the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility and as a member of the Virginia State Bar's Legal Ethics Committee.