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Flipper Ethics
By John M. Burkoff
Your guy suddenly decides to flip and cooperate with the government.
This is not what you expected at all and, what’s more, you are not so
sure you want to keep representing a client who has made such a
decision. So what can you do? What should you do? What do you have to
do? Well, the first thing is clear. Unless you have already memorized
your jurisdiction’s lawyers’ ethics code, you better take it off the
shelf, blow off the dust, and take a look at it before you make a
misstep that you will regret later. Assuming that your jurisdiction uses
some basic version of the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of
Professional Conduct (most do today), you will probably find that you
would do well to bear the following things in mind.
Your client gets to decide what he wants to do, not you.
It is your client’s life that is at stake, not yours. He gets to
decide the basic objectives of the representation (as opposed to the
means you will use to attain those obje
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