Please explain the three positions on legal assistant screening.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The first position is that legal assistants may not be screened because lawyers may not be screened. This is based on the fact that the rules of ethics do not provide for screening as a solution for imputed disqualification problems (except for former government lawyers), and also because the rules clearly provide that lawyers should ensure that their nonlawyer employees comport themselves with the same professional standards as if they were lawyers. The second position is that legal assistants may be screened to the extent that lawyers may be screened. Some jurisdictions do approve of private practice lawyers being screened as a method of avoiding imputed disqualification. Where jurisdictions do allow such lawyers to be screened, they do so assuming that the lawyer that is to be screened possesses no This would allow a lawyer who simply happened to work for a firm that had a client that is being opposed by the lawyer’s new firm to be screened, but not where the lawyer actually represented the client at the former firm. Thus, if lawyers can be screened, so can legal assistants.
The third position is that legal assistants may be screened even if lawyers may not be screened. There are two possibilities here. First, some jurisdictions allow legal assistants to be screened even if they do not allow lawyers to be screened (this is the position of the ABA, in its 1988 ethics opinion). Second, a jurisdiction could allow legal assistants to be screened, even where the legal assistants have acquired confidential information or worked on the disputed matter, which is generally not allowed for lawyers.