Source: https://www.sdcba.org/index.cfm?pg=LEC2011-2
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 20:33:14+00:00

Document:
Attorney is representing Client, a plaintiff former employee in a wrongful discharge action. While the matter is in its early stages, Attorney has by now received former employer’s answer to the complaint and therefore knows that the former employer is represented by counsel and who that counsel is. Attorney obtained from Client a list of all of Client’s former employer’s employees. Attorney sends out a “friending”1 request to two high-ranking company employees whom Client has identified as being dissatisfied with the employer and therefore likely to make disparaging comments about the employer on their social media page. The friend request gives only Attorney’s name. Attorney is concerned that those employees, out of concern for their jobs, may not be as forthcoming with their opinions in depositions and intends to use any relevant information he obtains from these social media sites to advance the interests of Client in the litigation.
Has Attorney violated his ethical obligations under the California Rules of Professional Conduct, the State Bar Act, or case law addressing the ethical obligations of attorneys?
1. Are the High-ranking Employees Represented Parties?
The threshold question is whether the high-ranking employees of the represented corporate adversary are “parties” for purposes of this rule.
The term “high-ranking employee” suggests that these employees “exercise substantial discretionary authority over decisions that determine organizational policy” and therefore should be treated as part of the represented corporate party for purposes of Rule 2-100. At minimum, the attorney should probe his client closely about the functions these employees actually perform for the company-adversary before treating those high-ranking employees as unrepresented persons.
2. Does a Friend request Constitute Unethical Ex Parte Contact with the High-Ranking Employees?
Assuming these employees are represented for purposes of Rule 2-100, the critical next question is whether a friend request is a direct or indirect communication by the attorney to the represented party “about the subject of the representation.” When a Facebook user clicks on the “Add as Friend” button next to a person’s name without adding a personal message, Facebook sends a message to the would-be friend that reads: “[Name] wants to be friends with you on Facebook.” The requester may edit this form request to friend to include additional information, such as information about how the requester knows the recipient or why the request is being made. The recipient, in turn, my send a message to the requester asking for further information about him or her before deciding whether to accept the sender as a friend.
A friend request nominally generated by Facebook and not the attorney is at least an indirect ex parte communication with a represented party for purposes of Rule 2-100(A). The harder question is whether the statement Facebook uses to alert the represented party to the attorney’s friend request is a communication “about the subject of the representation.” We believe the context in which that statement is made and the attorney’s motive in making it matter. Given what results when a friend request is accepted, the statement from Facebook to the would-be friend could just as accurately read: “[Name] wants to have access to the information you are sharing on your Facebook page.” If the communication to the represented party is motivated by the quest for information about the subject of the representation, the communication with the represented party is about the subject matter of that representation.
A recent federal trial court ruling addressing Rule 2-100 supports this textual analysis. In U.S. v. Sierra Pacific Industries (E.D. Cal. 2010) 2010 WL 4778051, the question before the District Court was whether counsel for a corporation in an action brought by the government alleging corporate responsibility for a forest fire violated Rule 2-100 when counsel, while attending a Forest Service sponsored field trip to a fuel reduction project site that was open to the public, questioned Forest Service employees about fuel breaks, fire severity, and the contract provisions the Forest Service requires for fire prevention in timber sale projects without disclosing to the employees that he was seeking the information for use in the pending litigation and that he was representing a party opposing the government in the litigation. The Court concluded that counsel had violated the Rule and its reasoning is instructive. It was undisputed that defense counsel communicated directly with the Forest Service employees, knew they were represented by counsel, and did not have the consent of opposing counsel to question them. (2010 WL 4778051, *5.) Defense counsel claimed, however, that his questioning of the Forest Service employees fell within the exception found in Rule 2-100(C)(1), permitting “[c]ommunications with a public officer. . .,” and within his First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances because he indisputably had the right to attend the publicly open Forest Service excursion.
While acknowledging defense counsel’s First Amendment right to attend the tour (id. at *5), the Court found no evidence that defense counsel’s questioning of the litigation related questioning of the employees, who had no “authority to change a policy or grant some specific request for redress that [counsel] was presenting,” was an exercise of his right to petition the government for redress of grievances. (Id. at *6.) “Rather, the facts show and the court finds that he was attempting to obtain information for use in the litigation that should have been pursued through counsel and through the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure governing discovery.” (Ibid., emphasis added.) Defense counsel’s interviews of the Forest Service employees on matters his corporate client considered part of the litigation without notice to, or the consent of, government counsel “strikes at . . . the very policy purpose for the no contact rule.” (Ibid.) In other words, counsel’s motive for making the contact with the represented party was at the heart of why the contact was prohibited by Rule 2-100, that is, he was “attempting to obtain information for use in the litigation,” a motive shared by the attorney making a friend request to a represented party opponent.
The Court further concluded that, while the ABA Model Rule analog to California Rule of Professional Conduct 2-100 was not controlling, defense counsel’s ex parte contacts violated that rule as well. “Unconsented questioning of an opposing party’s employees on matters that counsel has reason to believe are at issue in the pending litigation is barred under ABA Rule 4.2 unless the sole purpose of the communication is to exercise a constitutional right of access to officials having the authority to act upon or decide the policy matter being presented. In addition, advance notice to the government’s counsel is required.” (Id. at *7, emphasis added.) Thus, under both the California Rule of Professional Conduct and the ABA Model Rule addressing ex parte communication with a represented party, the purpose of the attorney’s ex parte communication is at the heart of the offense.
The Discussion Note for Rule 2-100 opens with a statement that the rule is designed to control communication between an attorney and an opposing party. The purpose of the rule is undermined by the contemplated friend request and there is no statutory scheme or case law that overrides the rule in this context. The same Discussion Note recognizes that nothing under Rule 2-100 prevents the parties themselves from communicating about the subject matter of the representation and “nothing in the rule precludes the attorney from advising the client that such a communication can be made.” (Discussion Note to Rule 2-100). But direct communication with an attorney is different.
Objection 1: The friend request is not about the subject of the representation because the request does not refer to the issues raised by the representation.
The answer to this objection is that as a matter of logic and language, the subject of the representation need not be directly referenced in the query for the query to be “about,” or concerning, the subject of the representation. The extensive ex parte questioning of the represented party in Sierra Pacific Industries is different in degree, not in kind, from an ex parte friend request to a represented opposing party. It is not uncommon in the course of litigation or transactional negotiations for open-ended, generic questions to impel the other side to disclose information that is richly relevant to the matter. The motive for an otherwise anodyne inquiry establishes its connection to the subject matter of the representation.
It is important to underscore at this point that a communication “about the subject of the representation” has a broader scope than a communication relevant to the issues in the representation, which determines admissibility at trial. (Bridgestone/Firestone, Inc. v. Superior Court (1992) 7 Cal.App.4th 1384, 1392.) In litigation, discovery is permitted “regarding any matter, not privileged, that is relevant to the subject matter of the pending matter. . . .” (Cal. Code Civ. Proc. § 2017.010.) Discovery casts a wide net. “For discovery purposes, information should be regarded as ‘relevant to the subject matter’ if it might reasonably assist a party in evaluating the case, preparing for trial, or facilitating settlement thereof.” (Weil & Brown, Cal. Prac. Guide: Civ. Pro. Before Trial (The Rutter Group 2010), 8C-1, ¶8:66.1, emphasis in the original, citations omitted.) The breadth of the attorney’s duty to avoid ex parte communication with a represented party about the subject of a representation extends at least as far as the breadth of the attorney’s right to seek formal discovery from a represented party about the subject of litigation. Information uncovered in the immediate aftermath of a represented party’s response to a friend request at least “might reasonably assist a party in evaluating the case, preparing for trial, or facilitating settlement thereof.” (Ibid.) Similar considerations are transferable to the transactional context, even though the rules governing discovery are replaced by the professional norms governing due diligence.
In Midwest Motor Sports v. Arctic Cat Sales, Inc. (8th Cir. 2003) 347 F.3d 693, Franchisee A of South Dakota sued Franchisor of Minnesota for wrongfully terminating its franchise and for installing Franchisee B, also named as a defendant, in Franchisee A’s place. A “critical portion” of this litigation was Franchisee A’s expert’s opinion that Franchisee A had sustained one million dollars in damages as a result of the termination. (Id. at 697.) Franchisor’s attorney sent a private investigator into both Franchisee A’s and Franchisee B’s showroom to speak to, and surreptitiously tape record, their employees about their sales volumes and sales practices. Among others to whom the investigator spoke and tape-recorded was Franchisee B’s president.
The Eighth Circuit affirmed the trial court’s order issuing evidentiary sanctions against Franchisor for engaging in unethical ex parte contact with represented parties. The Court held that the investigator’s inquiry about Franchisee B’s sales volumes of Franchisor’s machines was impermissible ex parte communication about the subject of the representation for purposes of Model Rule 4.2, adopted by South Dakota. “Because every [Franchisor machine] sold by [Franchisee B] was a machine not sold by [Franchisee A], the damages estimate [by Franchisee A’s expert] could have been challenged in part by how much [Franchisor machine] business [Franchisee B] was actually doing.” (Id. at 697-698.) It was enough to offend the rule that the inquiry was designed to elicit information about the subject of the representation; it was not necessary that the inquiry directly refer to that subject.
Similarly, in the hypothetical case that frames the issue in this opinion, defense counsel may be expected to ask plaintiff former employee general questions in a deposition about her recent activities to obtain evidence relevant to whether plaintiff failed to mitigate her damages. (BAJI 10.16.) That is the same information, among other things, counsel may hope to obtain by asking the represented party to friend him and give him access to her recent postings. An open-ended inquiry to a represented party in a deposition seeking information about the matter in the presence of opposing counsel is qualitatively no different from an open-ended inquiry to a represented party in cyberspace seeking information about the matter outside the presence of opposing counsel. Yet one is sanctioned and the other, as Midwest Motors demonstrated, is sanctionable.
The second objection to this analysis is that there is no difference between an attorney who makes a friend request to an opposing party and an attorney suing a corporation who accesses the corporation’s website or who hires an investigator to uncover information about a party adversary from online and other sources of information.
Objection 3: The attorney-client privilege does not protect anything a party posts on a Facebook page, even a page accessible to only a limited circle of people.
That observation may be true as far as it goes4, but it overlooks the distinct, though overlapping purposes served by the attorney-client privilege, on the one hand, and the prohibition on ex parte communication with a represented party, on the other. The privilege is designed to encourage parties to share freely with their counsel information needed to further the purpose of the representation by protecting attorney-client communications from disclosure.
The rule barring ex parte communication with a represented party is designed to avoid disrupting the trust essential to the attorney-client relationship. “The rule against communicating with a represented party without the consent of that party's counsel shields a party's substantive interests against encroachment by opposing counsel and safeguards the relationship between the party and her attorney. . . . [T]he trust necessary for a successful attorney-client relationship is eviscerated when the client is lured into clandestine meetings with the lawyer for the opposition.” (U.S. v. Lopez (9th Cir. 1993) 4 F.3d 1455, 1459.) The same could be said where a client is lured into clandestine communication with opposing counsel through the unwitting acceptance of an ex parte friend request.
Objection 4: A recent Ninth Circuit ruling appears to hold that Rule 2-100 is not violated by engaging in deceptive tactics to obtain damaging information from a represented party.
Fourth and finally, objectors may argue that the Ninth Circuit recently has ruled that Rule 2-100 does not prohibit outright deception to obtain information from a source. Surely, then, the same rule does not prohibit a friend request which states only truthful information, even if it does not disclose the reason for the request. The basis for this final contention is U.S. v. Carona (9th Cir. 2011) 630 F.3d 917, 2011 WL 32581. In that case, the question before the Court of Appeals was whether a prosecutor violated Rule 2-100 by providing fake subpoena attachments to a cooperating witness to elicit pre-indictment, non-custodial incriminating statements during a conversation with defendant, a former county sheriff accused of political corruption whose counsel had notified the government that he was representing the former sheriff in the matter. “There was no direct communications here between the prosecutors and [the defendant]. The indirect communications did not resemble an interrogation. Nor did the use of fake subpoena attachments make the informant the alter ego of the prosecutor.” (Id. at *5.) The Court ruled that, even if the conduct did violate Rule 2-100, the district court did not abuse its discretion in not suppressing the statements, on the ground that state bar discipline was available to address any prosecutorial misconduct, the tapes of an incriminating conversation between the cooperating witness and the defendant obtained by using the fake documents. “The fact that the state bar did not thereafter take action against the prosecutor here does not prove the inadequacy of the remedy. It may, to the contrary, (Third) of the Law Governing Lawyers, the corporate attorney-client privilege may be waived only by an authorized agent of the corporation.
There are several responses to this final objection. First, Carona was a ruling on the appropriateness of excluding evidence, not a disciplinary ruling as such. The same is true, however, of U.S. v. Sierra Pacific Industries, which addressed a party’s entitlement to a protective order as a result of a Rule 2-100 violation. Second, the Court ruled that the exclusion of the evidence was unnecessary because of the availability of state bar discipline if the prosecutor had offended Rule 2-100. The Court of Appeals’ discussion of Rule 2-100 therefore was dicta. Third, the primary reason the Court of Appeals found no violation of Rule 2-100 was because there was no direct contact between the prosecutor and the represented criminal defendant. The same cannot be said of an attorney who makes a direct ex parte friend request to a represented party.
We believe that the attorney in this scenario also violates his ethical duty not to deceive by making a friend request to a represented party’s Facebook page without disclosing why the request is being made. This part of the analysis applies whether the person sought to be friended is represented or not and whether the person is a party to the matter or not.
Unlike many jurisdictions, California has not incorporated these provisions of the Model Rules into its Rules of Professional Conduct or its State Bar Act. The provision coming closest to imposing a generalized duty not to deceive is Business & Professions Code section 6068(d), which makes it the duty of a California lawyer “[t]o employ, for the purpose of maintaining the causes confided to him or her those means only as are consistent with truth, and never seek to mislead the judge . . . by an artifice or false statement of fact or law.” This provision is typically applied to allegations that an attorney misled a judge, suggesting that the second clause in the provision merely amplifies the first. (See e.g., Griffith v. State Bar of Cal. (1953) 40 Cal.2d 470.) But while no authority was found applying the provision to attorney deception of anyone other than a judicial officer, its language is not necessarily so limited. The provision is phrased in the conjunctive, arguably setting forth a general duty not to deceive anyone and a more specific duty not to mislead a judge by any false statement or fact or law. We could find no authority addressing the question one way or the other.
In Shafer v. Berger, Kahn, Shafton, Moss, Figler, Simon & Gladstone (2003) 107 Cal.App.4th 54, 74, the Court of Appeal ruled that insured’s judgment creditors had the right to sue insurer’s coverage counsel for misrepresenting the scope of coverage under the insurance policy. The Shafer Court cited as authority, inter alia, Fire Ins. Exchange v. Bell by Bell (Ind. 1994) 643 N.E.2d 310, holding that insured had a viable claim against counsel for insurer for falsely stating that the policy limits were $100,000 when he knew they were $300,000.
If there is a duty not to deceive opposing counsel, who is far better equipped by training than lay witnesses to protect himself against the deception of his adversary, the duty surely precludes an attorney from deceiving a lay witness. But is it impermissible deception to seek to friend a witness without disclosing the purpose of the friend request, even if the witness is not a represented party and thus, as set forth above, subject to the prohibition on ex parte contact? We believe that it is.
omits a highly material fact, namely, that the third party who asks to be allowed access to the witness’s pages is doing so only because he or she is intent on obtaining information and sharing it with a lawyer for use in a lawsuit to impeach the testimony of the witness. The omission would purposefully conceal that fact from the witness for the purpose of inducing the witness to allow access, when she may not do so if she knew the third person was associated with the [attorney] and the true purpose of the access was to obtain information for the purpose of impeaching her testimony.
We agree with the scope of the duty set forth in the Philadelphia Bar Association opinion, notwithstanding the value in informal discovery on which the City of New York Bar Association focused. Even where an attorney may overcome other ethical objections to sending a friend request, the attorney should not send such a request to someone involved in the matter for which he has been retained without disclosing his affiliation and the purpose for the request.
Nothing would preclude the attorney’s client himself from making a friend request to an opposing party or a potential witness in the case. Such a request, though, presumably would be rejected by the recipient who knows the sender by name. The only way to gain access, then, is for the attorney to exploit a party’s unfamiliarity with the attorney’s identity and therefore his adversarial relationship with the recipient. That is exactly the kind of attorney deception of which courts disapprove.
Social media sites have opened a broad highway on which users may post their most private personal information. But Facebook, at least, enables its users to place limits on who may see that information. The rules of ethics impose limits on how attorneys may obtain information that is not publicly available, particularly from opposing parties who are represented by counsel.
We have concluded that those rules bar an attorney from making an ex parte friend request of a represented party. An attorney’s ex parte communication to a represented party intended to elicit information about the subject matter of the representation is impermissible no matter what words are used in the communication and no matter how that communication is transmitted to the represented party. We have further concluded that the attorney’s duty not to deceive prohibits him from making a friend request even of unrepresented witnesses without disclosing the purpose of the request. Represented parties shouldn’t have “friends” like that and no one – represented or not, party or non-party – should be misled into accepting such a friendship. In our view, this strikes the right balance between allowing unfettered access to what is public on the Internet about parties without intruding on the attorney-client relationship of opposing parties and surreptitiously circumventing the privacy even of those who are unrepresented.
1 Quotation marks are dropped in the balance of this opinion for this now widely used verb form of the term “friend” in the context of Facebook.
2 Sierra Pacific Industries also is factually distinguishable from the scenario addressed here because it involved ex parte communication with a represented government party opponent rather than a private employer. But that distinction made it harder to establish a Rule 2-100 violation, not easier. That is because a finding of a violation of the rule had to overcome the attorney’s constitutional right to petition government representatives. Those rights are not implicated where an attorney makes ex parte contact with a private represented party in an analogous setting, such as a corporate – or residential – open house.
5 The New York County Bar Association approached a similar issue differently in approving in “narrow” circumstances the use of an undercover investigator by non-government lawyers to mislead a party about the investigator’s identity and purpose in gathering evidence of an alleged violation of civil rights or intellectual property rights. (NYCLA Comm. On Prof. Ethics Formal Op. 737, p. 1). The Bar explained that the kind of deception of which it was approving “is commonly associated with discrimination and trademark/copyright testers and undercover investigators and includes, but is not limited to, posing as consumers, tenants, home buyers or job seekers while negotiating or engaging in a transaction that is not by itself unlawful.” (Id. at p. 2.) The opinion specifically “does not address whether a lawyer is ever permitted to make dissembling statements himself or herself.” (Id. at p. 1.) The opinion also is limited to conduct that does not otherwise violate New York’s Code of Professional Responsibility, “(including, but not limited to DR 7-104, the ‘no-contact’ rule).” (Id. at p. 6.) Whatever the merits of the opinion on an issue on which the Bar acknowledged there was “no nationwide consensus” (id. at p. 5), the opinion has no application to an ex parte friend request made by an attorney to a party where the attorney is posing as a friend to gather evidence outside of the special kind of cases and special kind of conduct addressed by the New York opinion.

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