Clown, please explain this to me

[Halt]

Could you please elaborate on this piece of text that I found here so that the average person can understand this in layman's terms.

EXCEPTIONS TO THE ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGE

There are some public policy exceptions to the application of the attorney-client privilege. Some of the most common exceptions to the privilege include:

Death of a Client. The privilege may be breached upon the death of a testator-client if litigation ensues between the decedent's heirs, legatees or other parties claiming under the deceased client.

Fiduciary Duty. A corporation's right to assert the attorney-client privilege is not absolute. An exception to the privilege has been carved out when the corporation's shareholders wish to pierce the corporation's attorney-client privilege.

Crime or Fraud Exception. If a client seeks advice from an attorney to assist with the furtherance of a crime or fraud or the post-commission concealment of the crime or fraud, then the communication is not privileged. If, however, the client has completed a crime or fraud and then seeks the advice of legal counsel, such communications are privileged unless the client considers covering up the crime or fraud.

Common Interest Exception. If two parties are represented by the same attorney in a single legal matter, neither client may assert the attorney-client privilege against the other in subsequent litigation if the subsequent litigation pertained to the subject matter of the previous joint representation.

[Clown]

Hi Sam:

I'm an amateur in legal matters, and I need to (ironically) disclaim any legal responsibility for the potential inaccuracy of someone who is not an actual lawyer in any meaningful sense. However, let me see how much material I remember from my high school law class.

When you hire a lawyer to work on your behalf in legal matters and to represent you in court, the lawyer can’t be expected to defend you if the lawyer doesn’t know that much about you. For example, if you were a defendant of a murder charge in a criminal suit, proving an alibi can be a critical part of your legal defense, but if your lawyer has no information to work with, how is your lawyer supposed to defend you during a cross-examination?

As a result, a lawyer’s client needs to be able to trust his lawyer to act in his interest and to maintain the confidentiality of communication that occurs. In that same hypothetical murder scenario, even if you were to admit to your lawyer that you are completely guilty of the murder, you wouldn’t want your lawyer to essentially confess for you, especially if that were to sign your death warrant in a capital case. Ultimately, then, attorney-client privilege refers to the legal responsibility of a lawyer to protect the confidentiality of his communication with his client.

However, there are exceptions to this “right” to confidentiality on your lawyer’s part as outlined by this document.

First, if you die, the lawyer is still obligated to act in “your interest,” but in your absence, he may have to speak as if he were literally you thereby breaching confidentiality in a law suit over your inheritance. For instance, if a celebrity were to die thereby leaving 10 million dollars to his 3 kids, and the kids are suing each other for their respective piece of their parent’s pie, you, as the now-dead celebrity’s lawyer, may need to reveal details of your communication with the celebrity to resolve the dispute. As a result, a dead person can’t practically expect confidentiality.

Second, shareholders of a corporation who are financially invested in that corporation have a “right to know” what is going on. As a result, there are situations where the lawyers who work on behalf of that corporation have to balance the corporate interest with the shareholders’ interest, and this may entail the technical breach of confidentiality. I am not familiar enough with corporate law or the legal precedent for this, but I can imagine that as a shareholder, I would want to know if my money was being misused or mishandled by a company, and I would also be interested in knowing if the company was guilty of corporate or financial crimes that could implicate me as a shareholder.

Third, the law trumps confidentiality if a lawyer’s client essentially asks the lawyer to help with a crime or cover for the crime. While a lawyer is thus allowed to act in his own interest to avoid becoming guilty of being an accessory or a party to a crime, this would be a different situation than a scenario where someone seeks legal counsel after receiving a criminal charge. More specifically, when someone is arrested and advised of his right to an attorney whereby a lawyer advises that person of how the defendant can be best defended in litigation, that conversation is privileged. But if that same defendant admitted guilt to the lawyer and specifically asked the lawyer to cover up the crime or commit perjury to help the defendant avoid a sentence, this would not be privileged. (I have to admit that I’m not sure how this would work in the real world. If someone admits guilt to a lawyer in a conversation that was initially privileged or confidential, is that lawyer screwed from that moment moving forward? Does that lawyer become a party to a crime if that lawyer proceeds to work for the defendant of the charge? I might be misunderstanding what is going on here.)

Fourth, the common interest exception kicks in when there is no practical benefit for confidentiality being preserved with individual clients when those multiple parties have a common interest. For example, let’s say 10 people sued a car company in a class-action lawsuit because of some faulty car part leading to car accidents, health or injury issues, and other damages; and let’s say the 10 plaintiffs hire the same lawyer to organize the class-action suit. Those 10 plaintiffs have no reason for that one lawyer to protect the key details of each individual plaintiffs’ situation from the other plaintiffs when all 10 plaintiffs are on the same side suing the same company for the same reason. Let’s say a second law suit occurs a year later with another group of 10 plaintiffs where 2 of the original 10 plaintiffs are suing the company a second time for further damages caused by the car situation. Those 2 plaintiffs in the “subsequent litigation” may request confidentiality when the second suit is related to the previous “joint representation.”

To summarize: if you are a shareholder of a corporation, if you are asking a lawyer to sacrifice his integrity to become an accessory to a crime, and if you have a joint interest with someone else (i.e., multiple plaintiffs in a class action law suit), the commonly accepted right to the confidentiality and privacy of your communication with your lawyer does not apply. And if you die, it’s no longer practical due to obvious reasons.

To simplify then: the right to the privacy of your communications and relationship with your lawyer can be overridden by a circumstance (i.e., your death) or the interests of another party (i.e., the lawyer's own interest).

(As a side note, I saw in the link that the government had the ability to remove attorney-client privilege in Patriot Act - related scenarios where terrorism was a factor. That's an example of something where a personal right could have been trumped by the government's perception of its interest or national security. So, in essence, for attorney-client privilege to become less important than another factor, that other factor has to be extraordinarily important: there has to be a really good reason for this privilege to be lost and for a lawyer to thus "spill the beans" on his own client.)

Hope that helps. Sam, let me know if you need further clarification. This was a fun exercise in testing my knowledge.

Sincerely,
Isaac

[Demonoid]

What's going on?

[Clown]

Sam's in law class and I doubled the size of the original source material in layman terms

[Halt]

I was just asking for clarification on a few particulars, nothing is going on. And since Clown intends to go to law school, it is good practice for him to expand upon, elaborate, and explain things to others. This is a good skill set to have, especially in law, having the ability to articulate your finer points in an effort to win an argument/lawsuit.