In Re Public Defender Service

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• reasoning that to create a crime-fraud exception that includes past statements made merely evidencing an intent to commit a crime or fraud, would undermine the attorney's ability to discourage such actions
• explaining that a lawyer’s advice “is even more vital when the client misguidedly contemplates or proposes actions that the client knows to be illegal”
• explaining that the purposes of the attorney-client privilege “do not include concealing abuses of the attorney-client relationship to further the commission of a crime or fraud”
• explaining that “[t]he government does not have to show that the intended crime or fraud was accomplished, only that the lawyer’s advice or other services were misused” (emphasis added)
• rejecting view “that the crime-fraud exception applies only when a crime or fraud has been completed”
• explaining the “crime- fraud exception does not apply where the attorney talks the client out of committing the crime or fraud he contemplates or stops the client’s scheme dead in its tracks”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).