Business & Corporate
Reflections on the Lawyer’s Duty of Confidence
Simon M. Lorne
In my years of practice, I’ve been privileged to occupy a number of different positions, from law firm partner, to the Securities Exchange Commission’s general counsel, to my current role as chief legal officer of a major hedge fund advisor. In all of those roles, I’ve been actively involved with this committee, and particularly with the question of how appropriately to balance the lawyer’s duty of client confidentiality with the ability to perceive, and perhaps to prevent, a course of client conduct that may subsequently be characterized by enforcement authorities—the SEC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Department of Justice, etc.—as client improprieties. Perhaps obviously, I choose my words carefully. When those authorities do challenge a course of conduct, they are likely to identify it as “fraud,” but it was likely not identified as such by the lawyer at the time, and to so characterize it is to bias the analysis of the lawyer’s obligation. Those questions were surfaced in a number of high-profile SEC cases from the 1970s to the early 1990s.