We’ve written before to remind in-house lawyers that even if you don’t sign pleadings or appear in court on behalf of your corporate employer, you are still practicing law when you give advice and participate in business transactions on your employer’s behalf. If you do so without being duly licensed, you are straying into unauthorized
Seventy-four amicus firms weigh in to support in-house firm counsel privilege
We posted here about the in-house firm counsel privilege, and the New York case that held late last year that the privilege didn’t apply where a malpractice plaintiff was seeking to discover all relevant communications of his former lawyers.
The opinion in Stock v. Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP is in the New York
No privilege for communications by risk manager who was also a lawyer
Corporate organization
charts increasingly include slots for departments with names like “risk management,” “claims handling,” and the like. When lawyers head or staff such departments, does the attorney-client privilege cover their communications with company management? Not necessarily, says a new opinion from the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Casey v. Unitek Global Services, Inc.
Sex discrimination
Licensing requirements trip up in-house lawyer
Small lapses can sometimes snowball into big problems, as an in-house Pennsylvania lawyer for a large pharmaceutical company found out when she was suspended for six months for the unauthorized practice of law.
The lawyer failed to comply with her yearly continuing-legal-education requirements; as a result, she was placed on inactive status in 2009,
Court upholds attorney-client privilege for in-house counsel
Employee communications made in confidence during a company’s internal investigation can be protected by the attorney-client privilege even where in-house counsel leads the investigation, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has said in a recent ruling.
While the result in In Re: Kellogg Brown & Root, Inc. is not surprising, the case is noteworthy both