'Who Is Your Client? The First Ethics Question for Counsel' explored online

American Law Institute Continuing Legal Education will present a webcast on “Who Is Your Client? The First Ethics Question for Counsel” on Thursday, July 13, from noon to 1:30 p.m.

Representing corporate clients – whether as in-house or outside counsel – is not always a straightforward matter when it comes to ethical issues. Any conflicts of interest, privilege, and similar ethics issues each hinge on the most basic question that all corporate counsel must be able to answer in the course of their representation: exactly who is your “client?” This 90-minute webcast uses a series of hypothetical scenarios to explore client identity in a variety of contexts that attorneys who represent businesses might encounter.

Taught by an experienced commercial litigator, advisor, speaker, and author on ethics and privilege issues, this program briefly discusses client identity outside the corporate entity, such as for associations, insured, and estates. The majority of this webcast focuses on determining who the client is within the corporate entity or corporate family, including what happens during corporate stock and asset sale transactions, and when dealing with corporate employees.

Situations to be explored during the webcast include:

• When representing an association, whether you may take matters adverse to individual members of the association (without their consent).

• If hired by an insurance company to represent one of its insureds, do you also represent the insurance company.

• Under what circumstances shareholders can successfully gain access to a general counsel’s communications with their corporate client’s management.

• When two owners in a closely-held corporation become acutely adverse, can you represent the corporation and one of the owners in litigation against the other owner.

• Whether in house lawyers jointly represent both the parent corporation and all of its subsidiaries.

Written material on the topic, included with registration, provides a resource after the program. Questions will be submitted live to the faculty.

Cost for the webcast is $249. To register, visit www.ali-cle.org.