Office of the General Counsel

• Publication year: 2018
• Pages: 0052
• Citation: Vol. 23 No. 7 Pg. 0052

Office of the General Counsel Vol. 23, No. 7 Pg. 52 Georgia Bar Journal June, 2018

Bye-Bye Go-Bys

BY PAULA FREDERICK

Your second-year associate drives you crazy she spends more time begging other lawyers for forms to use as a "go-by than it would take to draft a document from scratch. This time, however, she spotted a mistake in a form contract that the firm has been using for years. . . .

You congratulate her on catching the error. "Good eye, Gina! I don't know how many times I've used this contract without noticing that we cited the wrong statute.

"Thank goodness I double-checked the cite," Gina says. "According to Joe, we used that form four or five times last year alone. So"”are you going to let those clients know the contract needs to be corrected?" Gina asks.

"I hadn't even gotten that far," you muse. "Do we have to?"

Must a lawyer notify a client of the lawyer's own mistake?

It depends . . . .

The American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Ethics recently issued Formal Opinion 481 addressing that question.

The opinion speaks in terms of "material error" in a representation. It requires a lawyer to tell a current client about a mistake if an independent lawyer would conclude it was reasonably likely to harm or prejudice a client, or if it is the type of error that might reasonably cause a client to consider terminating the representation even where there has been no harm or prejudice.

The duty to inform the client comes from Rule 1.4, which requires a lawyer to inform the client of significant developments regarding a representation, even if the information is harmful to the lawyer. Not...