Ethical Considerations for Corporate Counsel: Who Is the Client?—Featuring Tom Spahn (On Demand Seminar)

A pre-recorded streaming VIDEO replay of the March 2022 webcast, Ethical Considerations for Corporate Counsel: Who Is the Client?—Featuring Tom Spahn.

Join Tom Spahn for this program using hypotheticals to explore the most basic question that all corporate in-house and outside lawyers must answer: exactly who is the "client"? Among other things, topics discussed:

• Who is the corporate lawyer's client within the corporate entity, and whether lawyers can be retained by a constituent such as an Audit Committee or group of independent directors
• Who is the client within a corporate family, whether outside lawyers can be adverse to one corporate family member while simultaneously representing another on an unrelated matter, and whether in-house lawyers automatically represent their corporate employer's affiliates
• The impact of client identity in corporate transactions, including ownership of the attorney-client relationship (and the accompanying privilege) in stock and asset sales, and the effect of joint representations in selling or spinning off subsidiaries
• Whether corporate in-house and outside lawyers can also represent corporate employees, the implications of such representations, and how to avoid accidentally creating such representations
• Whether corporations' shareholders must ever be considered the corporate lawyers' "clients," including the fiduciary exception's application

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Thomas E. Spahn, McGuireWoods LLP / Tysons

Thomas E. Spahn practices as a commercial litigator with McGuireWoods in Tysons, Virginia. He was selected as the 2013 and 2020 metro-Washington, DC "Lawyer of the Year" for "Bet the Company Litigation" by The Best Lawyers in America (Woodward/White, Inc.). He has served on the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, and is a member of the American Law Institute and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. He is a Fellow of the Virginia Law Foundation. Mr. Spahn has written extensively on attorney-client privilege (including the Virginia CLE^® publications The Attorney-Client Privilege and the Work Product Doctrine: A Practitioner's Guide and A Virginia-Specific Summary Guide: The Attorney-Client Privilege and the Work Product Doctrine), ethics, and other topics, and has spoken at over 1,400 CLE programs throughout the U.S. and in several foreign countries. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale University and received his J.D. from Yale Law School.