COURSE DESCRIPTION
The real estate industry is fiercely competitive as developers and contractors, investors and lenders, brokers and others – often with the aid of legal counsel seek advantage. This can easily present real estate lawyers with ethical dilemmas. Conflicts of interest are rife. There are issues of communicating and negotiating with unrepresented parties. There are also issues of taking an equity stake in a real estate venture in lieu of fees. Sometimes, too, there is the discovery that a client is engaged in wrongdoing. These and many other ethical issues arise in real estate practice. This program will provide you with a real-world guide to common ethics issues in real estate practice.
- Joint representations of a business entity and its owners in a real estate transaction
- Representation of a client with adverse interests in unrelated transactions
- Exchange of legal services for transaction equity
- Communications with unrepresented parties – and with represented parties
- Inadvertent disclosure of confidential Transaction terms
- Special issues when client wrongdoing is discovered
Speakers:
William Freivogel is the principal of Freivogel Ethics Consulting and is an independent consultant to law firms on ethics and risk management. He was a trial lawyer for 22 years and has practiced in the areas of legal ethics and lawyer malpractice for more than 25 years. He is chair of the Editorial Board of the ABA/BNA Lawyers’ Manual on Professional Conduct. He maintains the Web site “Freivogel on Conflicts” at www.freivogelonconflicts.com .
Thomas E. Spahn is a partner in the McLean, Virginia office of McGuireWoods, LLP, where he has a substantial practice advising clients on properly creating and preserving the attorney-client privilege and work product protections. For more than 30 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 a member of the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility and as a member of the Virginia State Bar's Legal Ethics Committee.