This article tackles the concepts of client-attorney
privilege, confidentiality and professional secrecy, and
essentially answers the question: can you really tell your lawyer
where the bodies are buried?
The movie industry has been exploiting the concepts of
client-attorney privilege, confidentiality and professional secrecy
with great abandon for decades. There is a library of movies in
which lawyers are often portrayed as quasi-accomplices in their
clients' crimes, blatantly abusing of client-attorney privilege
in order to protect themselves and their clients from the long arm
of the law.
While these movies make for great entertainment by grossly
exaggerating, even distorting, the lengths to which an upstanding
lawyer will go to in his/her clients' interests, they are based
on concepts which are common in most jurisdictions, namely
professional secrecy, legal privilege and confidentiality. This
common thread probably explains why they capture
