Lawyer Ethics and the Internet

course

COURSE INFO

  • Available Until 6/21/2021
  • Next Class Time 11:00 AM MT
  • Duration 60 min.
  • Format MP3 Download
  • Program Code 06212019
  • Ethics Credits 1 hour(s)


Course Price: $89.00

COURSE DESCRIPTION

The Web has become a universal platform for research and communication, including for lawyers.  You can learn a great deal about witnesses, parties, judges, and jurors with a simple Google search.  Add in social media searches – blogs, Facebook, Twitter and many other platforms – and you can develop a rich demographic profile of all of these individuals.  With a few keystrokes, you can pull down more information than ever before.  You can also communicate freely, unmediated and unrestricted, across the Web.  But each of these activities, undoubtedly useful in litigation and transactional practice, also give rise to substantial ethics issues – not everything that the Web enables is proper. This program will provide you with a real world guide to ethics issues when lawyer engage in research and communication using the Internet. 

  • Communicating with parties, opposing attorneys, and witnesses via email, social media, and texting
  • Researching jurors, parties, witnesses and judges via social media
  • Ethical issues when blogging or sending newsletters/law updates to clients
  • Trends in texting, confidentiality, and discoverability
  • Ethics of using web sites, online advertising and social media for client development purposes

Speaker:

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.  He received his B.A., magna cum laude, from Yale University and his J.D. from Yale Law School.