COURSE DESCRIPTION
Discovery can be the most important phase of litigation, directing the course and outcome of the case. How evidence is discovered, how it is used, and how mistakes in its handling are disclosed and remedied all raise very significant ethical issues. These issues – the risk of mishandling – are increased by the vast growth of ESI, electronically stored information. Litigators have certain obligations that their vendors comply with ethics rules. There are also issues surrounding the use of paralegals in discovery practice. Failure to ensure ethics compliance during discovery can have a material adverse impact on the underlying litigation and draw an ethics complaint. This program will provide you with a real-world guide to substantial issues ethical issues that arise in discovery practice and how to avoid ethics complaints.
- Duty of candor to the tribunal during discovery
- Ethical issues when you learn that a client is dishonest
- Inadvertent disclosure privileged documents and their handling
- Ethics in depositions – conferring with witnesses, using video depositions and more
- Ethical issues in widespread data mining of discovery documents
- Issues involving metadata in electronic files – documents, email, text messages
- Attorney-client privilege and security issues of working with outside e-discovery vendors
- Ethics and social media discovery
Speakers:
Elizabeth Treubert Simon is an ethics attorney in the Washington, D.C. office of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, where she advises on a wide range of ethics and compliance-related matters to support Akin Gump’s offices worldwide. Previously, she practiced law in Washington DC and New York, focusing on business and commercial litigation and providing counsel to clients regarding professional ethics and attorney disciplinary procedures. She is a member of the New York State Bar Association Committee on Professional Discipline and the District of Columbia Legal Ethics Committee. She writes and speaks extensively on attorney ethics issues.
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.