When a law firm or client acquires an opponent's attorney-client information through surreptitious means such as hiring an outside counsel a former employee of the opposing party, the outside counsel in question must be disqualified from the representation. Read More
A law firm hired to represent water district and later fired, need not recuse itself from representing other water districts in the same litigation, especially since the first water district did not demand the recusal until ten years after hiring the law firm and was aware of the other representations the whole time. Read More
An attorney who represented two clients directly in conflict with each other was properly disqualified from representing either of them. Read More
A former client need prove only that attorney’s fraud and breach of fiduciary duty in secretly funneling information about the client to opposing party while negotiating a settlement was a substantial factor in causing her harm, not that she would have obtained a better result but from the attorney’s wrongdoing. Read More
When the lawyer with a conflict of interest left the firm while its appeal from the order disqualifying it was pending, the appellate court remands for the trial court to consider whether disqualification is still required. Read More
As a general rule in California, where an attorney is disqualified from representation, the entire law firm is vicariously disqualified as well. However, the general presumption is a rebuttable one, which can be refuted by evidence that an ethical wall or other circumstances has prevented the sharing of confidences in a particular case. Read More
The defendant’s attorney did not form a confidential non-client relationship with the plaintiff broker and so was not disqualified from representing the defendant; the information the attorney obtained from the broker either was necessary to the broker’s handling a property sale for defendant or was not confidential. Read More
Attorney who had represented a corporation and its control group is not disqualified from representing the control group in a shareholder derivative action because the control group already knows the corporation’s confidential information. Read More
No matter how the attorney receives another party’s inadvertently produced privileged material, the attorney owes a duty to notify the privilege holder and await a court’s resolution of any dispute over existence or waiver of the privilege; failure to do so may lead to disqualification. Read More
Buyer of bogus securities states a federal securities fraud claim against the promoter’s lawyer who represented that the promoter was who he purported to be and who misdirected buyer’s downpayment to promoter personally rather than seller company. Read More
