COURSE DESCRIPTION
Lawyer use of technology, in both their professional and personal lives, is inescapable, and frequently those two worlds blend and give rise to substantial ethical issues. It’s difficult to disconnect from constant digital communications. Lawyers talk to, email, text and otherwise communicate with clients on smartphones, tablets, and social media. Frequently these and laptops are connected to public or at best semi-secure networks, despite the fact they are used to carry sensitive and often confidential information. The ease of technology obscures its complexity – a complexity lawyers are required, as duty of competence, to understand before they use it. This program will provide you with a roadmap through the maze of ethical issues that occur when lawyers use technology in their lives and practices.
- Lawyers and social media – obtaining information on clients, adversaries, jurors and others
- Ethics when you’re never unplugged from technology
- Traps for law firms when using the cloud
- Ethics and working remotely
- Lawyer ethics when texting clients, witnesses, and others
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.