Doug Schafer's Campaign Pledge
for Election to Washington State Supreme Court, Position 6

I will change the hired-gun culture of lawyers so they stop enabling so much fraud, crime, and corruption (like Enron, WorldCom, etc.).  I will do it by pressing my eight fellow judges to change the lawyer ethics rules. We should adopt, as other states have, lawyers ethics rules—
  • that require lawyers to report other lawyers’ and judges’ corruption or serious misconduct.
  • that allow or require lawyers to report corruption or lawlessness by government officials.
  • that require lawyers to stop, or else report, their clients’ fraud or crime.
  • that allow or require lawyers to reveal client secrets to prevent likely death or serious bodily harm to anyone by anyone.
  • that allow or require lawyers to reveal client secrets to help victims of fraud or crime in which the client used the lawyer.
  • that allow or require lawyers to reveal client secrets to stop child or vulnerable adult abuse, neglect, or exploitation.
If the other judges won’t support these changes, I will urge you to vote them out of office. Our Supreme Court’s most important job is providing moral leadership to our state’s over 27,000 lawyers and judges.
Doug Schafer 

Important Notice:  The Wash. State Bar Assoc. (WSBA) in early October 2004 submitted to the Wash. State Supreme Court for consideration and adoption certain proposed ethics rule changes that reject most of these public-interest exceptions to lawyer-client confidentiality.  But in early 2003, WSBA Professionalism Counsel Barrie Althoff had recommended that lawyers should be required to report client secrets when the traditional public-interest exceptions to confidentiality would apply (e.g., to aid victims of clients' crime/fraud), because that is what the public expects from lawyers!  Soon the public will be invited by the Court to comment on the WSBA proposal.  For background information about the ABA model ethics rules changes, about Mr. Althoff's and others' recommendations, and about the WSBA proposal, click here.

For information about lawyer ethics rules on lawyer reporting of their discoveries of client crime and fraud, see:

Compilation of Historic Lawyer "Ethics" Rules on Acting to Prevent/Rectify Client Crime/Fraud

Compilation of 32 states' Rectify Fraud portions of their lawyer ethics Rule 1.6 or equivalent rule, with links.

Admonition in 1985 to the Wash. State Supreme Court by UW Ethics Law Prof. Rob Aronson to Retain the Historic Ethics Rule That Always Had Permitted Lawyers to Rectify Clients' Fraud