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Trust Me! I'm a Lawyer - Thing to tell your lawyer
THINGS TO TELL YOUR LAWYER.
Can you really tell your lawyer anything? Well, it depends.
I am here to tell you that you should be telling your lawyer everything you possibly can related to their representation of you. Lawyers are bound by confidentiality between attorney and client; this allows us to get all the details from you to represent you to the best of our ability. For example, if you have a lawyer for your business, you should be telling them things about your business, contracts your business has entered, if there is an issue with an employee, and anything else that may impact the business. If you hire a lawyer for a criminal charge, you should be telling them EVERYTHING related to that charge.
The Oklahoma Rules of Professional Conduct can be found in the Oklahoma Statutes within Title 5 Attorneys and the State Bar. Rule 1.6 – Confidentiality of Information lays out the rules regarding confidentiality and the duty your lawyer has. Part (a) of Rule 1.6 provides “a lawyer shall not reveal information relating to the representation of a client unless the client gives informed consent, the disclosure is impliedly authorized in order to carry out the representation or the disclosure is permitted…” This rule is extremely important for clients as it provides protection for the sensitive information you need to share with your lawyer.
The rule goes on to define the permitted disclosures, such as “to prevent reasonably certain death or substantial bodily harm; to prevent the client from committing: a crime;” These two are the big ones lawyers have to keep in the back of their minds. If you tell your lawyer you are going to harm yourself or others, even in the context of attorney-client communication, the lawyer may disclose that information to a third party, such as a reporting agency or health facility. If you tell your lawyer you are going to move five hundred pounds of product to Texas next week they can disclose that information to a third party without violating attorney-client confidentiality.
BUT if you tell your lawyer that you moved five hundred pounds of product to Texas last week, we are to keep that in confidence IF you have retained your lawyer for that purpose.
Another key part of this rule is “information relating to the representation of a client” if you tell your lawyer about something outside of their representation, like the affair your neighbor is having that no one knows about yet, they are not required to keep that confidential pursuant to this rule, because that is outside of the information relating to their representation.
