Lawyers must protect their clients’ confidence, but they can’t aid in the commission of a potential crime. The Wall Street Journal covered some of the facts leading up to the “noisy withdrawal” of Thomas Sjoblom of Proskauer Rose LLP from their representation of the Stanford Financial Group: Top Lawyer’s Withdrawal From Stanford Case Waves a Flag.
There was much consternation over the idea of an attorney whistle-blowing on her client back when Sarbanes-Oxley was adopted. Legal ethics, business ethics and ethics were at odds. An attorney is divided between doing what is right for society at large, for her client and her own income.
Lawyers represent guilty people. They are there to help them through the legal system and ensure the government did not overstep its constitutional limitations. Stanford was in trouble and needed the help of lawyers. In this time of crisis Stanford’s lawyer ended his representation.
Charlie Green finds much fault with the approach and found the use of “disaffirm” to be a bit trivial for the magnitude of the underlying scandal. Stephen Gillers in his comment points out that “the word ‘disaffirm’ is actually a term of art in New York legal ethics.”
I am giving Mr. Sjoblom the benefit of the doubt that he did not find out about the fraud at Stanford until sometime in late January or early February when they had to respond to the SEC subpoena. It certainly sounds like the February 10 testimony of Laura Pendergest-Holt, a Stanford executive, in front SEC investigators did not go well. She got arrested and Mr. Sjoblom made his noisy withdrawal.
There is a lot of work ahead for Stanford’s lawyers in sorting out the facts, defending the company and defending the executives. Sjoblom stepped away from this representation and turned down hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars or revenue to be made from the representation.
There is a big difference between defending a criminal and being a witness to a crime. It sounds like Mr. Sjoblom realized that he had become a witness to a crime and incapable of defense.
Someday we may hear the true story of what happened. As with the Madoff scandal, I am very interested in finding out the underlying facts. Did they start out bad? If they originally had good intentions, what made these people go bad?
r
Source
http://www.compliancebuilding.com/2009/03/09/lawyers-noisy-withdrawal-from-stanford-case/
r
No comments:
Post a Comment