Corporate counsel dealing with government investigations often must decide whether the company’s counsel should also represent the company’s employees, whether those employees should have separate counsel, or whether the company’s counsel should represent employees jointly with separate individual counsel. Codes of professional conduct generally allow an attorney to represent a corporation and its employees simultaneously, but require the attorney to weigh existing or potential conflicts of interests before embarking on such a joint representation.1 But beyond the ethical issues involved in joint representations, there also are practical issues that a corporate counsel must consider in determining the optimal representation arrangement.
This article discusses the considerationsethical and strategicthat corporate counsel should consider before undertaking sole or joint representation of individual employees, and provides some recommendations for joint representation of a company and employees in those circumstances in which such an arrangement is advisable.
