Glannon Guide to Professional Responsibility

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Conflicts of interest can arise between a lawyer and an individual client (the lawyer's personal interests and those of the client), or between different clients (one client's interests in tension with another client's interests). These lateral conflicts can arise between current clients, between a former client and a current client, and between prospective clients and current (or future) clients. Third parties can also have conflicts with current clients, as when family members of the client pay the lawyer's fees for representation, or when an insurance company pays a lawyer to represent an insured. Of course, judges can have conflicts of interest, between the judge and parties in a case, or between the judge and lawyers representing parties in that court. An additional category of problems in this area is that we "impute" a conflict of interest to the lawyer's co-workers, especially the other lawyers at that firm or agency. Thus, the issue of "imputed conflicts" arises when lawyers work together - one lawyer's conflict could disqualify all the other lawyers employed there. Some imputed conflicts, however, are easy to eliminate, as we will see in the discussion that follows"--