Ethics

Abbe and I are working on the 4th edition of ULE, and would appreciate some help on our discussion of MR 1.13.  The discussion begins:

Those who have long lobbied for exceptions to lawyer-client confidentiality to protect third parties from client fraud won a major victory in the ABA?s 2003 amendments to MR 1.6. How much of a victory would it have been, however, if those amendments had included the following condition on disclosure of client fraud on third parties: ``provided, however, that the lawyer shall not act to prevent, mitigate, or rectify client fraud unless it is in the interests of the client to do so.?? Obviously, such a proviso would nullify the disclosure of client fraud, since it would rarely if ever be in the interests of the client to have the lawyer blow the whistle on the client?s fraud. 

    When the fraud is that of a corporate client, however, that proviso, nullifying disclosure of the client?s fraud, is precisely what the ABA has written into MR 1.13. 

This analysis has been out in several publications, including the ABAJ, for several years.  During that time, we  have received only one comment that disagreed; at first, that comment seemed to make sense, but on reflection, it doesn't.

If anyone has a different view from ours on 1.13, or knows of authority that we have missed, I'd appreciate hearing about it, either here or at lawmhf@hofstra.edu.