The American Bar Association Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility recently addressed the ethical obligations of lawyers to surrender papers and property to which a former client is entitled.
Formal Opinion 471 is intended to provide guidance to lawyers on the types of material that an attorney must surrender to a client after serving that client for an extended period of time — in this case a decade.
The guidance stems from a query from a lawyer who has represented a local municipality for 10 years pursuant to a contract for legal services.
After the contract expired and the municipality chose a different lawyer, the city requested that the lawyer provide the new counsel with all files — open and closed.
The Standing Committee, drawing upon Model Rule 1.15 as well as Model Rule 1.16(d) related to safekeeping property and terminating representation, determined that the lawyer should take “steps to the extent reasonably practicable to protect a client’s interest, and such steps include surrendering to the former client papers and property to which the former client is entitled.
“A client is not entitled to papers and property that the lawyer generated for the lawyer’s own purpose in working on the client’s matter,” the opinion states. “However, when the lawyer’s representation of the client in a matter is terminated before the matter is completed, protection of the former client’s interest may require that certain materials the lawyer generated for the lawyer’s own purpose be provided to the client.”
The ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility periodically issues ethics opinions to guide lawyers, courts and the public in interpreting and applying ABA model ethics rules to specific issues of legal practice, client-lawyer relationships and judicial behavior.
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