Attorney Ethics 101: Fraud is Not Allowed
The non-legal press doesn’t usually get very deep into questions of legal ethics, but New York Magazine did a reasonable job of it in its hard-hitting piece this week on “The Bad, Good Lawyer” David Boies.
The article asks whether Boies has crossed an ethical line, principally in his work on behalf of Harvey Weinstein (This blog argued before that he did, in The Weinstein Saga: Now Featuring Lying Investigators, Duplicitous Journalists, Sloppy Lawyers.)
While admirably tough on Boies, it’s a shame the piece conflates unethical, illegal or even bad behavior with the decision by Boies to represent Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy or former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is accused of money laundering. There is no indication Boies enables these people or is somehow complicit in what they did to get themselves into trouble.
Similarly unnecessary in a serious look at a lawyer’s ethics are throwaway lines such as Boies’ “cozy personal relationship” with Bill Clinton. If that’s a negative, you could say the same about dozens of lawyers and hundreds of famous people.
But, the information in the story about the involvement of Boies’ daughter in movies produced by Weinstein’s company while Boies was advising Weinstein was interesting, as were the attacks by Boies on one outspoken Weinstein Company director, Lance Maerov, who turned out to be asking good questions about Weinstein’s personal conduct. Unlike some of the Weinstein Company directors, Maerov was doing his job.
What’s as disturbing as the way Boies and his firm failed to supervise a fraudulent investigation into Weinstein accusers and others by Israeli company Black Cube, is the defense of the practice by lawyers interviewed by the magazine. As we wrote about before, the agents of a U.S. lawyer shouldn’t go around pretending to be people they are not. A U.S. lawyer has the duty to supervise any agents the lawyer hires. Period.
Yet New York reports that “Some corporate litigators shrug off the Black Cube revelations, saying the only thing that was surprising was that all the embarrassing details escaped the usual vault of attorney-client confidentiality. ‘That happens, it doesn’t shock me,’ [prominent entertainment lawyer] Bert Fields says of the firm’s impersonation practices.”
Even worse was the quote from “another attorney who has dealt with Boies in the past,” who brushed the fraud off this way: “The technique is a tool … Lizzie Borden misused the ax.” Many lawyers said similar things to the article’s author: “This is just what lawyers do.”
If this is just what lawyers do, those lawyers ought to be disciplined for it.
Lawyers who know anything about professional responsibility know it is wrong to send investigators out to commit fraud. A quick instruction to “follow the rules” is not enough to qualify as adequate supervision.
Getting away with it is hardly justification. Imagine if someone defended unauthorized dipping into client escrow accounts. As long as the money gets paid back and the client is no wiser, who is harmed?
No lawyer would dare make that argument, but in the case of using fraudulent techniques, it’s all supposed to be OK if you don’t get caught.
If anyone wants to hire a lawyer they want to be sure won’t cross ethical lines, this is a good test question for them: Is it OK to hire investigators to set up fake identities to lure people into interviews?
For more good ways to screen for lawyers and investigators who know and abide by the rules, see my American Bar Association article, Five Questions Litigators Should Ask Before Hiring an Investigator (and Five Tips to Investigate it Yourself).
