"Chinese Walls of the Mind"
Introduction
1. Conflicts of interest have come to the fore recently as a result of the House of Lords decision in Bolkiah v KPMG. This decision has imposed very strict rules on advisors who face a former client conflict. Paradoxically, in one important type of case, the rules as to existing client conflicts appear at first glance to have been getting looser.1
2. The developments with which this paper is concerned do not concern the most obvious areas of conflict: where two clients have directly conflicting interests in a particular transaction, or where the advisor has an interest contrary to that of his client. Instead, recent cases on existing client conflicts have at their heart an advisor or agent who legitimately comes into possession of confidential information belonging to one client (client B) which turns out to be material to the interests of another client (client A).2 That is, of course, very similar to the position in former client
