Tom Spahn on Electronic Era Ethics

A pre-recorded streaming VIDEO replay of the September 2023 webcast, Tom Spahn on Electronic Era Ethics.

This program uses hypotheticals to highlight the dramatic effect email, texts, and other electronic communications have had on lawyers’ ethics duties. The program generally follows the lifespan of an attorney-client relationship.

• The creation of the relationship including the effect of an unsolicited email from a would-be client
• The ethical propriety of electronic communications with clients
• Communications with adversaries including “reply all” emails, lawyers’ responses to inadvertently transmitted communications, and metadata
• Dealing with third parties such as service providers and outsourced colleagues
• Discovery including accessing adverse witnesses’ social media
• Jurors’ research and communications
• Judges’ research and “friending” of lawyers
• Attorney-client relationship termination

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.