Legal Ethics
Running for Election Requires Attorney to Disclose Client List, Law Dean Says
Posted May 1, 2009, 12:56 pm CST
By Martha Neil
Should a lawyer running for election as city attorney have to disclose to the public a list of the clients he represented in private practice?
There's only one answer to that question: Yes, writes Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the new law school at the University of California at Irvine, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece.
Sparked by a controversy over exactly that disclosure issue in the current campaign for Los Angeles city attorney, his column says that no attorney-client privilege attaches to the simple fact of whether a lawyer represented a particular person.
Voters have a legitimate need to know about a candidate's client list, in order to determine whether potential conflicts are likely to require retention of expensive outside counsel, Chemerinsky writes. And "there is no way to evaluate whether a candidate has a potential conflict without disclosure of prior clients."
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