Ethical Issues in Contract Drafting

course

COURSE INFO

  • Presentation Date 5/24/2019
  • Next Class Time 1:00 PM ET
  • Duration 60 min.
  • Format Teleseminar
  • Ethics Credits 1 hour(s)


Course Price: $79.00
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COURSE DESCRIPTION

Negotiating, drafting and reviewing contracts are processes fraught with ethical issues.  Negotiations sometimes require zealous advocacy, taking maximal positions versus the counter-party or, at other times, require delicacy and balance.  Reviewing and drafting complex contracts is a similar ethical minefield. If you discover that the draft of a contract contains materially incorrect assumptions about the law but which will benefit your client, do you have the duty to disclose or correct the error?  In the same way, if the contract contains faulty assumptions about material facts, must you disclose those faulty assumptions?  And how do these rules apply when drafting a contract?  This program will provide you with a real world guide to the ethics of negotiating, drafting and reviewing contracts.

  • Issues when you know the legal assumptions of the other party are incorrect – must you disclosure?
  • Faulty factual assumptions made by a counter-party – must you correct them?
  • Ethics and rescission – are you ever ethically obligated to rescind or restate a contract?
  • Ethics in negotiations – what’s the dividing line between zealous representation v. outright deception? 

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.  He received his B.A., magna cum laude, from Yale University and his J.D. from Yale Law School.

H. Michael Drumm is the founder and member of Drumm Law, LLC in Denver, Colorado, where he has an extensive franchise, trademark and business transactional practice.  He works with franchisors across industries nationwide helping them draft, file and renew their franchise Disclosure Documents and franchise agreements.  He has a specialty representing craft breweries to help them trademark their brands and protect their intellectual property. He has been repeatedly honored by Franchise Times magazine as a “Legal Eagle” and has been designated by the International Franchise Association as a “Certified Franchise Executive.”  Mr. Drumm received his BSBA from the University of Missouri-Columbia and his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law.