The American Bar Association Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility released a formal opinion on March 5, 2025, that provides clarification on when a lawyer may divulge information when they are a victim of a crime by a client or prospective client.
March 10, 2025 Ethics and Professional Responsibility
ABA issues guidance allowing lawyers discretion when they are victims of crime by client
Formal Opinion 515 states that “a lawyer who is the victim of a crime by a client or prospective client may disclose information relating to the representation to the appropriate authority in order to seek an investigation and potential prosecution of the alleged offender or other services, remedy or redress. To the extent that the information would otherwise be subject to the lawyer’s duty of confidentiality under Model Rule of Professional Conduct 1.6, the information is subject to an implicit exception to the Rule.”
The exception also applies when someone associated with the lawyer or related to the lawyer is a victim of the client’s crime and the lawyer is a witness to that crime. The implied exception does not otherwise permit lawyers to report clients’ crimes against third parties.
The committee concluded that when a client commits a crime against a lawyer, Rule 1.6 implicitly permits the lawyer to disclose information about the client’s crime to the extent that is reasonably necessary to permit the relevant authorities to investigate and possibly prosecute the crime or to enable the lawyer to seek other services, remedy or redress.
The opinion noted that a client-lawyer relationship almost certainly cannot continue after the client victimizes the lawyer or someone associated with the lawyer and the lawyer reports the client’s crime. The lawyer also will ordinarily have an obligation under Rule 1.4 to inform the client that the disclosure will be or was made.
While rare, the committee has in the past identified an implicit exception to the duty of confidentiality in a recurring situation, such as this one, that was not considered by the drafters of the model rules or of prior ethics codes. The committee emphasized that lawyers are not free to disregard the rules whenever they conclude that the purposes underlying the rules are not being served. But what made applying Rule 1.6(a) unreasonable in this case was that doing so served no good purpose and would cause affirmative harm that seemingly was not contemplated by the rule drafters, who did not specifically consider the problem of clients’ crimes against their lawyers.
The standing committee periodically issues ethics opinions to guide lawyers, courts and the public in interpreting and applying ABA model ethics rules to specific issues of legal practice, client-lawyer relationships and judicial behavior.