[_jab]

I'm pretty tempted to discredit this article on the basis of the author's lack of legal expertise, but to be honest I don't really have the expertise to properly comment here either.

But I don't think the author is correctly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, and their repeated questioning of attorney-client privilege, which I've considered to be one of the foundations of the American legal system, is hard to take seriously.

Also, I don't think their depiction of John Adams's representation of the British soldiers is accurate. From what I can tell, Adams sought only to give his clients as strong a legal defense as possible. In the trial, he called the American protestors a "mob", gave a racist depiction of one of the victims to justify the soldiers' panic, and ultimately saw all but two soldiers acquitted. Adams viewed this as a patriotic act, yes, but only insofar as he believed all accused of crimes in America deserved fair legal representation. He was a lawyer defending his clients, not the judge or jury trying to find the "truth" of the matter.

[nathanyz]

So, one of the things I have personally seen is where these companies have in-house counsel and then CC that person on emails that could be problematic if they were ever required to be produced in discovery. Then if something does happen, it is easy to claim privilege on these emails and hide what are essentially non-legal related emails from lawsuits. There is flimsy cover of keeping counsel informed so they can provide legal guidance if needed, but that essentially undermines the legal process during a lawsuit as the very emails verifying a plaintiff's claim may be in these privileged emails, or maybe not, but without seeing them only the company and their legal teams knows.

Yes, this is unethical and also can lead to things like we see in this case where the judge will pierce privilege because it was being abused. But......unless you can prove that is what is going on in the emails, judges are very reticent to pierce privilege.

[freejazz]

>But I don't think the author is correctly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, and their repeated questioning of attorney-client privilege, which I've considered to be one of the foundations of the American legal system, is hard to take seriously.

Any particular reason why you think the author is incorrectly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, including attorney-client privilege?

>Adams viewed this as a patriotic act, yes, but only insofar as he believed all accused of crimes in America deserved fair legal representation. He was a lawyer defending his clients, not the judge or jury trying to find the "truth" of the matter.

I think you misunderstood the point, which was that if Adams had knowledge that the british soldier did have such an intent, he'd be violating his ethical obligations by withholding that information on the principal of attorney-client privilege.