Roisin Annesley’s Victorian Barristers’ practice guide

The Bar has produced a practice guide. It is a great achievement and stands as a beacon for the Law Institute’s future efforts at promulgating knowledge of the practice rules. The Bar actually has something called the Professional Standards Education Committee. Written by Roisin Annesley, it was launched by Victoria Marles, the Legal Services Commissioner on 18 October 2006, and distributed free to every member of the Bar. Annesley has done a lot of work as Counsel Assisting the Legal Profession Tribunal (and continues to do occasional work assisting the Legal Practice List at VCAT). A doyen of professional discipline, Paul Lacava SC, and a judge who has excoriated Professional Standards, Justice Gillard, are credited with substantial involvement. It has chapters on: Continue reading “Roisin Annesley’s Victorian Barristers’ practice guide”

Detailed new conflict rules commence in England

Solicitors’ Practice (Conflict) Amendment Rule 2004

(1) (Introduction)

(a) This rule sets out provisions for dealing with conflicts of interest other than
those conflicts in relation to conveyancing, property selling or mortgage
related services which are dealt with in rule 6.

(b) This rule applies to a regulated individual and a regulated practice.

(c) Conflicts between the duty of confidence and duty of disclosure owed by an
individual or a practice to two or more clients are dealt with in rule 16E. Continue reading “Detailed new conflict rules commence in England”

UK okays lawyers attacking former client’s honesty across a Chinese wall

The little guy in the centre is Lord Justice Mummery of the English Court of Appeal, an Oxford man shown here awarding some trophies at Oxford. He wrote the lead judgment in Gus Consulting GMBH v LeBoeuf Lamb Greeme & Macrae [2006] EWCA 683 handed down in late May. The American law firm against which the injunction was sought wheeled out Lord Neill of Blanden QC, a former judge, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, Chairman of the Bar Council, Chairman of the Senate of the Inns of Court, Chairman of the Press Council, director of The Times, legal adviser to the Synod of the Church of England, and Chairman of the Committee of Enquiry into Regulatory Arrangements at Lloyds. About as English as a pork pie, and a one-time member of the Committee on Standards in Public Life to boot. He got a difficult argument across the line.

A law firm discovered that it was acting in a dispute “which involve[d] a consideration of work they themselves did for those clients [7 to 8 years previously] and an attack on the honesty and integrity of their former clients in those very transactions”. Worse, the conflict had been missed when the lawyers who were mounting the attack on the former client joined the firm, bringing the new client with them. But until the conflict was noticed, the month after the lawyers’ move, the new members of the firm had been oblivious to the work previously done by it for the people they were now attacking, and steps were quickly put in place to prevent any access to the former client’s files. The Court refused an injunction sought by the former client enjoining the firm from acting against it, finding the Chinese wall to be efficacious. This is a case which falls squarely within what is governed by the Victorian Court of Appeal’s duty of loyalty to former clients: the taking up of cudgels against a former client in relation to the same or a related matter.

Having read many conflict cases, I strongly suspect cases involving mergers result in injunctions much more rarely than others. Furthermore, the fact that the injunction would have resulted in the loss to the new client of a legal team which had obviously been engaged for 3 years in a complicated dispute must have been a matter of great influence, though it is an entirely hidden factor in the reasons.

So the former client cannot enjoin its former lawyers from taking up the cudgels against it in a related matter. But what is to stop the new client of the firm from suing it for breach of the duty of disclosure (which is the duty which conflicts with the duty to keep the former client’s information confidential in these kinds of cases) when it fails to disclose that which it has undertaken to the Court not to disclose though it is relevant and “goes to the heart of” a key issue in the arbitration?

Continue reading “UK okays lawyers attacking former client’s honesty across a Chinese wall”

Conway v Ratiu: solicitors’ fiduciary duties

Conway v Ratiu [2005] EWCA Civ 1302, [2006] 1 All ER 571 (note), [2005] All ER (D) 103 (Nov) (full decision) English Court of Appeal (Auld LJ gave the lead decision with which Laws and Sedley LJJ agreed)

This report is an extract of 10 paragraphs from a defamation case in which, somehow or other, it was necessary to consider the nature of the solicitor’s fiduciary duty to the client. Lord Millett said in the leading modern English authority on conflicts between duties of confidentiality and of disclosure (that is, current client / past client conflicts) that the fiduciary duty terminates with the retainer, leaving only a duty of confidentiality. That is in a sense the principle taken issue with by Brooking JA in Spincode. Lord Justice Auld noted the principle had been wound back in Hilton v Barker Booth and Eastwood (a firm) [2005] UKHL at [28]-[30], and this proposition from Longstaff v Birtles [2001] EWCA Civ 1219 was cited with approval:

“The source of the [fiduciary] duty is not the retainer itself, but all the circumstances (including the retainer) creating a relationship of trust and confidence, from which flow obligations of loyalty and transparency. As long as that confidential relationship exists the solicitor must not place himself in a position where his duty to act in the interests of the confiding party and his personal interest … may conflict”. Continue reading “Conway v Ratiu: solicitors’ fiduciary duties”