Ethics Inside and Outside:
Internal Investigations and External Negotiations.

This is a Power Litigation™ article. The Power Litigation™ and Bucklin Trial Notebook™ trademarks each indicate publications for lawyers authored by Leonard Bucklin, a Fellow of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers.

A CLE course on current issues involving professional liability and ethics
for counsel for business entities.
 

Knowledge, tools, and techniques to avoid ethics traps in:

internal investigations for your client; and

external negotiations for your client.

These are what lawyers need to know in the Post-Enron and MCI environment. Whether you are:

  • Checking whether the company bookkeeper has embezzled;
  • Investigating a leak of corporate information by a corporate vice-president;
  • Responding to an employee's complaint of sexual harassment;
  • Negotiating a settlement of a tort claim of corporate wrongdoing; or
  • Fending off a governmental prosecution,

You need to know the legal ethics involved, what the ABA now says about your proposed actions in the investigation or negotiation, and what you as a lawyer can or cannot do with safety to you and your corporate employer or client. .

This course focuses on problems confronting attorneys who work for business entities. We start by considering real-day, real-time, practical legal ethics problems, including the following topics:

  • Identifying the client,
  • Attorney-client privilege,
  • Conflict of interest,
  • Overseeing internal investigations, and
  • Running company LCE (Legal Compliance and Ethics ) programs that help the attorney (and the corporate client) in internal investigations.

Internal investigations may be the result of external adversaries or lead to the need to deal with external adversaries. Thus, the course moves to practical ethics problems that develop in external negotiations with those adversaries.

Leonard Bucklin can provide your legal association or law office a short course on the ethics of negotiation.  Fee based on number in attendance and content that you want, but minimum fee is $2000

If you want to discuss a presentation of this course, then Contact Bucklin Directly.