The Ethics of
Internal Corporate Investigations

Course Syllabus

Ethics Inside and Outside:
Internal Investigations and External Negotiations

             By Leonard H. Bucklin

The Ethics Inside and Outside seminar will focus on current issues involving professional liability and ethics traps for counsel for business entities.   As an attendee, you will acquire knowledge of tools and techniques you can use to navigate through:

internal investigations for your client; and

external negotiations for your client.

These are what lawyers need to know in the post-Enron environment. Whether you are checking whether the company bookkeeper has embezzled, or negotiating with a claimant's attorney a settlement of a claim of corporate wrongdoing, you need to know ethics, what the ABA now says, and what you as a lawyer can do.

This course focuses on problems confronting attorneys who work for business entities. We will consider topics including the following: identifying the client, attorney-client privilege, conflict of interest, practical ethics problems in overseeing internal investigations, and running LCE (Legal Compliance and Ethics ) programs that help in internal investigations. Internal investigations may be the result of external adversaries or lead to the need to deal with external adversaries. Thus, after the above topics, we then move to some of the practical ethics problems that develop in external negotiations with those adversaries.