Attorney-Client Confidentiality

Proposal:

Attorney-client confidentiality should protect the communications between a person seeking legal advice and their licensed attorney, except when the communication is regarding a crime or fraud that the client is planning to commit or is attempting to cover up.

Intent:

The confidentiality between a client and an attorney should be limited to personal and business matters that are not relevant to the case. Clients must be able to trust that attorneys won’t disclose their private information and must be able to fully share with an attorney to get the best legal advice. However, the public must be able to trust that attorneys won’t enable criminals to evade justice.

Discussion:

The proposed right to justice states “No person shall be obligated to secrecy regarding violation of rights or criminal acts, or conspiracy to violate rights or commit criminal acts.”

The right to justice is a right, whereas attorney-client privilege is a privilege created by law, so in comparison to the old ways of writing laws it would be considered an “exception” to the privilege. An exception is really a higher priority rule, and that maxim is true here because rights are a higher priority than any law, especially a law granting a privilege.

An attorney may keep private information about unlawful acts that are not a violation of rights or crimes, such as driving faster than the speed limit when that did not result in any collision, or using recreational drugs when nobody else was harmed, etc.