EDITOR'S NOTES | Volume 7 - Number 6
publication date: Feb 9, 2009
In the legal profession, attorneys do not typically spend their entire careers at one firm. There is a considerable amount of job shuffling, especially in the early years of an attorney’s career. Considering that the industry now employs some 1.1 million lawyers (according to the American Bar Association), conflicts of interest are bound to arise. This week, we address conflicts of interest from two different angles.
In the first case, a general contractor was called upon to testify as an expert witness in a jury trial. The court rejected his status as an expert because he had bid on the project in question and therefore had a conflict of interest. An appeals court disagreed and remanded the case, stating that it was the jury’s prerogative, not the court’s, to decide credibility.
In the second case, an attorney served as an appointed neutral arbitrator on a defect claim, but later discovered a potential conflict of interest involving a newly hired member of his firm. The arbitration award was challenged on that basis and the dispute worked its way to a Minnesota appeal court, which determined that conflict of interest rules for arbitrators are more lenient than those imposed on attorneys.
This week’s final case is a lesson in bid protests. The GAO instructed a protesting bidder that if it was going to protest another bidder’s unbalanced bid, it also needed to challenge the accuracy of the agency’s quantity estimates. Without the latter challenge, the protest would fail.
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