 Thanks everybody for coming to this session, which is a panel about how should lawyers behave and about lawyer ethics in several different jurisdictions. So I think maybe if we can just go down the line and have everybody introduce themselves, say where you're from, and maybe indicate if there's a body of rules that govern lawyer ethics or lawyer behavior where you are situated or where you're qualified to practice. Yes, hi. My name is Miriam. I'm a lawyer in Germany based in Hamburg. Is that for me? Oh, OK, OK. I work with Bird and Bird, which some of you might know. We're focused on IP and IT law, and especially, of course, software licensing. And where we practice, there is a body of law covering ethics, but I don't think most of it applies here. It's more about, well, what kind of advertisement can you do? How can you advertise, and how much money can you charge? My name is Justin Colonino. I'm a lawyer in the United States, actually, barred in New York and Massachusetts. I currently work for Microsoft as an in-house counsel. And there is a body of rules in the United States. It's a state-by-state body of rules, but there's a kind of model rules that have been adopted by most states, including both Massachusetts and New York, that govern how lawyers should operate. Hi, I'm Amanda Brock. I'm a lawyer qualified in Scotland and England and Wales. I set up the legal team at Canonical and spent five years there. Not actually working as a lawyer at the moment. I work with OIN and on a new software project. I'm Pamela Chastek. I'm also a United States lawyer in North Carolina. As Justin mentioned, in the 50 states have 50 different sets of ethical rules. They all tend to be similar. I will say that I am admitted to practice in five different states. And in theory, I'm supposed to comply with all of the laws, all of the rules of all of those states. And in practice, some of them are directly contradictory. So I choose to follow the rules in North Carolina, which is where my office is and where I physically reside. But it gets tricky sometimes. So we originally got the idea for this panel because the laws, so I'm also a lawyer, but I'm not generally wearing my legal hat very often these days, and I'm admitted in the state of New York. And we want to do this panel because we found the ways that lawyers practice really vary from country to country. And the ways in which ethical issues come up in the practice of law is very interesting and I think a bit unusual in free and open source software. So I think maybe to start, where to start? Maybe we should talk about what would happen under ethical rules where you're qualified if, for example, some person, some developers say, corners you in a hallway at FOSDEM and starts to tell you, oh my gosh, I just had the most amazing thing and they start to talk to you and all of a sudden you realize they may be talking to you because they need legal advice. So then we can start, okay, yeah. So I haven't practiced the law for them very much. I've mostly worked in companies, so I would be happy to talk to them. And as soon as they got to the stage of being clear that they needed legal advice, I might give them an opinion, but I would probably have to tell them that I can't advise them because I work for particular companies who employ me. And then I would pass them on to one of the lawyers in a law firm. Well, and I will say that just a few weeks ago I attended a three-hour session, a three-hour ethics training. We have mandatory requirements every year that we do ethics training. Three hours spent on this very topic where it was all the scenarios of like, you're at a party and you've been drinking and someone comes up and so the problem in the United States is there are two issues, and Justin will know this better than I do because he does training, is have I established an attorney-client relationship and I have to worry about that, oh my God, are they going to think that I'm their attorney because they started talking to me so I want to disabuse them of that. What happens if you're their attorney? Why is that significant? Because then, well, there's also a duty of confidentiality. Even if I'm not their attorney, there still may be a duty of confidentiality in the information that they've told me. Raise your hand if you're scratching your head about what the duty of confidentiality might be. Okay, so does somebody else on the panel want to explain the duty of confidentiality? So yeah, at least in the United States and probably in many other jurisdictions. When you talk to a lawyer or give them information for the purpose of receiving advice about your rights and obligations under the law, then there's a duty of confidentiality. The lawyer needs to keep that confidential. And so if you're a lawyer and someone comes up to you and starts talking to you and seeking legal advice, that initial communication is confidential and this can be problematic for attorneys because down the road that could lead to a conflict of interest. So even though there hasn't been an attorney-to-client relationship that's necessarily been formed right then, you still need to keep the information confidential and you also have a duty to not use that information should you have some other party come along that represents you paying you to represent them. You need to think about, well, did the information that I have, is that gonna prejudice the person who came to me for legal advice in the first place? Wait a minute, wait a minute. So you're saying that if somebody just corners you in the hallway and says, without you saying anything, here's my problem. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You have to keep that confidential? Yes, and I probably try to cut them off pretty early in that conversation. Lawyers are pretty well known for getting a word in edgewise. So I would jump in at the right time, hopefully. Is that the same in Germany? What, that I would stop there? Well, would you have to keep that confidential with somebody without any agreement that you would be their lawyer? Well, without any agreement being their lawyer, you would be, well, representing them. But I have to admit, in all the years, it has never happened that it got to a point where I thought, well, this is really the time where I would say, well, now we actually need to sit down and put this in writing. Usually at conferences, maybe the conferences that I go to, or maybe the people I talk to, they are pretty aware of that as well, and they would not give you so confidential information in just a talk in the hallway where they're calling you. We've had very different experiences. Probably, it's probably true. Yes, and so what about if people email you? Is it the same thing, a cold email where somebody writes you about their problem and says, I'm seeking, I have this problem. And even what if they say, I'm seeking legal counsel for it? And then what if they don't say that, and they just, and I don't mean to put you on the spot, because we can move it to the UK. I'm having time for that. Okay, well, if I get an email like that, to be honest, I would be upfront about the fact that, you know, that probably requires legal advice, and if they actually wish to proceed with that, not because, you know, I'm keen to establish that, but because I think it's in their best interest to actually tell them, you know, this is really something that you should consider properly, and maybe have someone look through, and maybe have someone ask you a couple of questions about. And then once you get to the point where, you know, actually the lawyer also feels comfortable to make a decision about that, they will answer your question and you'll get a good response, but that would usually be proactive and, you know, from my end, not because I'm not. So is there an obligation or just a good practice? Well, when I looked at the law last night, I didn't find an obligation on that, but so I would say there probably isn't one, and it's not written down, but I just think, you know, that would be common sense to say this is where we're getting to a proper, like, lawyer-client relationship. We need to put that down and, you know, make sure this all goes the right way, so that you are aware of what's going on here as well. I wanna hear what's happening in the UK, so it's the same thing. Yes, it is, and like you, we have a huge book of rules that, I doubt anybody knows all of them inside out and you're going to check, but I think there's actually a couple of things that are relevant when you, when I saw how many hands went up about the confidentiality piece. So quite often, I've seen people react badly to asking lawyers to sign confidentiality agreements or nondisclosure agreements, and I've had a hard time from companies that I've worked in that I don't have them with outside lawyers. And the reason we don't generally put them in place is that we have these confidentiality obligations. It's not sort of out of lawyers being special or different or arrogant, although it might seem like that. It's because we just don't need them because we've got these obligations. Most firms will sign them if you want them to, but you don't really need it. The other thing I was gonna say is beyond just the rules, you sort of build, as a lawyer, your relationships with people, particularly in the community, on trust as well as on your strict rules. So I would take the view that if anybody came and told me something, knowing that I was a lawyer and it sort of verged on them needing legal advice, even though because I tend to work for a company, I would send them off to a law firm, it's not something that I would feel it was okay to go and discuss whether my professional rule actually kicked in or not. But what if, but what if, Amanda, what if the person gave you information that might be of relevance to say the software freedom conservancy and you and I were best friends. So if you're under, are you under an obligation to keep that information confidential or could you share it with me? I think, and this is a lawyer's cop out, probably not, but it would depend on what it was that was shared and whether they were actually clearly seeking legal advice and giving you confidential information. If the information was in the public domain already, that would be a slightly different thing. But I would probably verge on the edge of caution, but it depends. So what about in the U.S.? Well, I was just gonna say one of the things I learned at this ethics training which I was not aware of was even if the information is public, if you learned it within the bounds of your confidential relationship, you cannot talk about it. So I learned information from a client, it's then publicly announced, I still can't talk about anything that I learned in that confidential relationship. So certainly I think all of us would probably err on the side of caution is that we would, I just, if it's within the bounds of confidentiality, I zip it, and if it was at a party and someone thought that it was, they gave me information that clearly was confidential, I'm zipping it. So I don't think I'm too further, okay, I don't think that I'm sidetracking too much, but when you have that conversation with someone who's appointed as your lawyer, there's something called privilege that attaches to that where you get a right for that conversation not to be disclosable. There'll be rules in every different place about what exactly that means. But to the extent that the advice isn't commercial and it's about a legal issue, you're probably gonna have this protection around the relationship and the conversation you have. When you share that with other people, you can lose your privilege. So if a lawyer's emailed you some advice and you just distribute that generally, that can make that privilege go away because you've shared and disclosed it. I think it's a sort of very simple way of explaining it. So it's really important to understand when you're interacting with a lawyer, not just that they or you confidentiality, but that when you get that advice, it needs to be sort of looked after and protected by you so that it's not disclosable if you end up in litigation or some fight later. And when you're working with someone like me who is in house, whether or not I'm allowed that legal privilege in a conversation with someone in my company, at least in Europe, various country by country, so there's different views in the UK and Europe and sometimes it depends. So around antitrust, it can be different. But I think that whole relationship between you taking and paying for your legal advice or getting it for a bone or whatever it is and how you manage that's important. And sometimes what you'll see is that a lawyer in a law firm will be copied on everything all the time to try and keep the privilege and whether that works or not remains to be seen. So you should be careful. Yeah, that's called the potted plant approach where it's just like, well, the lawyer's copied so everything's privileged. That doesn't always work out. It is important to keep your privilege, it is yours and you can wave it by serving the advice widely. I mean, that's actually a particular problem in this space where so much transparency is required to build trust in community. Legal-list lawyering can be difficult because it's hard to do in a privileged setting when, for example, if a list is made public or if the list is not kind of restricted to people who really need to know the answers to those particular questions. And so that's something that project by project, I recommend people think about as you're setting up or if there's ever a legal issue, think about how to set it up so that the advice you're getting can remain privileged. But this is getting towards, this gets to how people should, how clients should behave or how non-lawyers should behave when they are talking to lawyers. I wanna know, I wanna know how lawyers should behave and I wanna know what happens if you don't behave. What happens if you share information you're not supposed to? Does anybody wanna comment on that? What happens if you violate any of these ethical rules? Well, there's a chance you lose your livelihood in license so one of the reasons why, one of the reasons why lawyers are so careful about complying with this is that if you lose your license, there goes a lot of time, effort in developing your livelihood. I just wanted to comment. So one of the things I wanted to sort of bring home, bring this back to reality is a lot of times as a lawyer, I may be asked to participate, say for example, in drafting a legal document but doing it in a forum that I don't know, I don't know who has access to it or how controlled the forum is or if it's a document that's being maintained on GitHub, can't you just submit a commit? And we're not being jerks if we don't wanna do it that way. If instead we insist on sending you an email and we insist on sending you a word document with the changes mark, it's because of this issue of privilege is we don't have the, it's not within our authority to waive privilege and so we have to be very, very attentive and careful to who can see the legal advice that we are providing. So another hypothetical. Amanda was before talking about, and this isn't necessarily for Amanda, but Amanda was talking before about being an in-house lawyer working at a company. Do you have anybody on this panel ever been in a situation or seen a situation where you were talking to an employee of a client or of a company that you're a lawyer on staff or that you're external to and kind of wondered what position, like what capacity they were talking to you. So maybe there's someone who works at a company who is also on the board of a foundation. Maybe there's a person talking to you who's on a governance committee or is a developer with commit access as a maintainer. Have you ever encountered that? Do you have any ethical rules come up with that? So you, as an employed lawyer, you have to act in the best interest of the company that employs you and that's not necessarily the best interests of individuals within that company even when they're acting within their own Paris. So it does sometimes cause a conflict where you are going to say no or push back on an individual's behavior because it's not best for the company but also there's a really difficult line actually between helping people out when they come and ask you about something and being useful and participating and then not doing what you're actually meant to do. So many times I've said to colleagues, you know I can't advise you. Whether it's about buying a house or getting divorced or all sorts of things that people want to talk to lawyers about, I will happily, if it's someone who actually is a friend, have a chat and listen to them talk about what their lawyer has told them or find lawyers for them or do whatever I can to help but you really have to be quite careful that people can't rely on it and it can be pretty awful when a person is in conflict with the organization that you're employed by, particularly if as Karen mentioned before, friends, people you like but your duty as a solicitor in my case or as an attorney is paramount to that and sometimes you can't do what you think you would like to do as a friend for someone. It's particularly difficult when you're seeing people exing companies. Sometimes the company will be kind and not make the in-house lawyer deal with it. You can pass that out to somebody externally and often that's for the best. So this would not be something that, I'm personally caught up in, but in Germany there's rules around who can actually provide legal advice, like properly look at an individual case and say this is how this should be treated under whatever law applies. But there's lawyers who can do that and there's just everyone else who can generally talk about a topic but you can't give legal advice if you're not admitted to whatever bar you wanna be admitted to. So for example, if you look at the Free Software Foundation's licensing list, you'll often find that they just give general answers, telling you what generally applies, but they would not give you specific advice about your specific scenario or the same with business associations where they say, well, this is the general setting or we think whatever copy left means this and this and that in general, but they would not tell you if whatever case you're looking at is actually qualifying as this or that, they would just give you a general idea. If you then want to have a specific answer to whatever question you have, you would actually need to go see a lawyer as in someone who's admitted and allowed to call themselves a lawyer. And I can imagine that in a situation like that, you will often come into kind of a, well, you just get caught up, right? Where someone approaches you knowing your lawyer and you could probably give them a specific advice, but at the same time, they are not approaching you as a lawyer right there and then. So, of course, you're still bound by all these rules and can just say, well, in general, this is how it works. And if you need something more, then we actually need to change the setting here. When I was in private practice, we had things related to, companies would hire our firm to do investigations into something that had happened. Maybe they were out of compliance of the law or whatever. And so when you're, those types of investigations where, something's gone wrong for a company and there's someone in the company who's responsible for that, that immediately puts a wedge between the interests of the company and the employee. And when you sit down to have a conversation with the employee, you need to tell them, you have a right to counsel. I am a lawyer. I am the company's lawyer. I am not your lawyer. And making that very clear to them is extremely important under the ethical rules because otherwise they might have a misimpression that what they're telling you is privileged when really it's not and you're gonna tell the company and the company holds the privilege over you and they could disclose what the employee is telling you. Now, Justin, what if you're talking to someone and you happen to know that they're an employee of the company that you're advising, but they also happen to be on the board of an organization and that organization has a lawyer. Does that change anything for you? So, I think your hypothetical is getting at, getting at the rules around- Represented parties. Yes, exactly. Rules around represented parties. So if you're communicating with somebody it could be a developer, it could be a board member of a company and you know that person is represented by counsel and you're corresponding about legal matters, you shouldn't be corresponding with them, you should be corresponding with the person, the lawyer who's representing them. Which is so unusual for this field because it's otherwise basically unheard of that you could be a lawyer in a company and have a represented person who is also an employee of the org. It's wacky. Is it the same in the UK and Germany? It is the same in the UK and it's surprising how many lawyers ignore it. So if you as a lawyer know that there's representation for another legal entity, whether it's a foundation or a company or whatever it is, you are not meant to deal directly with the individual. So I've tended to get around that by copying people in and just being inclusive and seeming gentle about it as opposed to saying I'm not speaking to you, which doesn't go down very well. I'm trying to keep my thread here. There was something else I was gonna mention about, give me a minute and I'll come back on it. I have another, Pam, do you want a time in? It is the same in Germany. So if you're representing a client, you can talk to the opposing party if they are represented as well. Of course, if they don't have representation, it's a different thing, but oftentimes you will also find it might be in the best interest of both parties if actually you talk lawyer to lawyer about a couple of things. So generally speaking, if someone tells you, please hold back a little bit, there might be a good reason for that as well. The other thing I was gonna add to that is as a solicitor, at least, I don't know about attorneys, barristers are different, but you don't have to act for someone. So if someone comes to you as a lawyer and asks you to do something, you still have your duties of confidentiality, et cetera, but you don't have to do the work. So if you asked me to draft a commons clause, I wouldn't do it because I would choose not to do that. Oh, you would say no. You would say I have not drafted a commons clause. I have said no. Even though I am your lawyer. I have been asked to do something similar a couple of times and I've said no to it because I don't think it's appropriate, but that's my personal view, not any corporate view, and my own ethics and morals. I'm allied those as well as being a solicitor. I won't ask you to go down the row and answer that question. But maybe Mark had a question. It's a question related to unrepresented parties. When one of the parties is represented as if they're on a board of a nonprofit. But if you have an employee who's a contributor in their own individual. But if you have an employee who's a contributor in their individual capacity. To an open source project. To an open source project that your company is using. And your project. And your employee. And you're advising them about how to interact with their project as an employee. It's just that's going to take too long. Okay. How do you deal with the, dealing with that employee when you want to tell them something in the company's interest, but they also have their own legal rights at stake in that project. Say for example, like there's a project that your company owns copyrights in. There's a licensing violation on that project. It's actually in your company's interest to ignore it for whatever reason. But you're dealing with an employee who has copyrights in that project. And they might personally care about that. Okay. Cause that was actually the question I wanted to ask is the last question. So let's move that microphone back. All right. So if I, if I parged that correctly. The question is. When you're advising an employee, you're talking to an employee who has dual, is wearing multiple hats, right? They're an employee of your company and there, there's an outside interest in something of importance to the company. What do you do? I think, you know, the general advice here would be, be really clear with the person about what's going on. Say this is like, we're talking about the company now. If you have other interests in this, you can seek your own legal advice. But from a company perspective, that's what we're talking about. And I can't represent you outside of that. And that's the same in Germany and the same in the UK. Okay. What if your client, this is a really, really fast, what if your client you discover is violating the GPL and they're not going to do anything about it? What obligations do you have? If any. Anyone can answer that. You don't have to answer. Your client? Your client. Being the company? Your client is the company. The company is in violation. The company is in violation. You discover it. The company has no intention of coming into compliance. What are your obligations, if anyone wants to answer it? I tell the company to get into compliance. And if they say. I'll take that. Yeah. And I think the answer, and they say no. They say no. And I have a duty of confidentiality to my client and I zip it. They're out of compliance. I'm not allowed to talk about it because I have a duty of confidentiality. That's, I think that's the end of it, right? Okay, do you want to go ahead? Yeah, well I would say the same thing. I might add, you know, if they are not compliant, I would always acting as an external counsel, of course, point out the risks, right? What could happen if they don't get into compliance, right? Make that clear. But in the end, I can't force them to make a different decision. I might have a different opinion about it, but you know, that's still a decision they need to make as long as they are aware of the risk. And of course, like you said, you know, there's a confidentiality obligation, which you need to stick to. What is the point of that? So I was just about to say something similar. So ultimately, we are advisors. We are not enforcers and we are not the police. There are points where your codes of conduct and rules would say that a company not listening to your advice has gone too far and you shouldn't stay and work there. So criminal activity, that kind of thing. But on a personal and a moral level, if you're not attuned anymore with the company you're advising, you can move on. So I just want, oh, do you want to add something? Just to come back around and kind of reiterate that point. You know, we're lawyers. We advise. We're not hypnotists. We can't strongarm people. Like, we don't have guns. We can just say like, you can't force anyone to do anything. It's just like, here are the rights and responsibilities. Here are the obligations. This is what you should do. That's what a lawyer does. And the client can decide to ignore the advice. And you guys often want this, so you might not like what I'm about to say. Quite a lot of what we do is trying to be creative and find ways of achieving what it is you want to do without breaking the law or doing it wrong. So it's not just black and white telling you what the law is. Yeah, I mean, I also wanted to reiterate a lot of time that what we do do is persuade as much as possible. And so we try to point out the pitfalls of this behavior that is wrongful that you're going to get caught. These are the ramifications of what you get caught. This is going to be much more harmful to the business. If that happens rather, it's much easier to just comply with the license rather than ignore it. What if you get caught? And so we try to work really hard to use our power persuasion to explain why the lawful course is always better than the unlawful course. But sometimes you can't. And then sometimes you get to say, I told you so when they get caught, but. I think I love this a good ending. So I think there was a question in the back. And this panel is longer than I thought it was. So this is exciting. So think of your tough questions. And I want to just, while we wait for the microphone to go in the back, there are lawyers whose entire job it is to advise other lawyers on ethical issues. This is sticky. It's hard. And just thank you to these panelists for being willing to answer it because all of them are experts in free and open source software law. They're not ethics experts. And so this is awesome. Hi. So a question on how lawyers should behave. But not on ethics. So do you have rules, for example, on IT level that your laptop should be encrypted or you should not use cloud services or not provide your replies into proprietary document formats? Can we talk GDPR here? No, actually, I mean, because, so yes, certainly from my experience, law firms have become, first off, law firms are targeted because they have such sensitive information that they are targets. And any law firm who doesn't understand that is out of touch with the world. So yes, I think that you should have a high expectation of a law firm to have very appropriate for their size, but good security practices. So in the UK, I think we tend to have practice notes that don't actually prescribe exactly what you have to do, but set sort of standards that you should try and achieve. Yeah, it's similar in the US. It's not completely, so there have been some advisory opinions around confidentiality and IT that have come out. And if I'm recalling, you have to do what's reasonable. That's what lawyers use when we don't really know what the right answer is. We just say, well, you just have to act reasonably. And reasonable means don't do stupid stuff. So that's basically what the IT policy. Is that true in the UK and Germany, too? What we're not supposed to do? Is it reasonable to just have a reasonable standard? That's the word? OK. Does that apply? So I think yes. And I can say, personally, we are obliged to keep, of course, all the information secret. And I always find the encryption that is applied is a pretty good standard. I'm personally surprised at what we have in place. So compared to other points, I thought it was pretty good. And a lot of what we're talking about or have talked about is worrying about accidentally creating a lawyer-client relationship. But we also have loads of rules about when we take a client on, having to do anti-money laundering and know your customer type checks. So it can be a bit of a pain. But you have to see someone's ID and other ways of proving where they, if it's an individual where they live, corporate setup, details, that kind of thing. I don't think we have that. No. Can you say that? Oh, yeah. No, we don't have anything like that. We can take the sleaziest kind of people, at least. No. That's enough. Yeah, we could take anonymous people. Really? Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know any reason not to. Yeah, I don't know a reason not to. I was just confusing it with whether I would do that. I actually, I will say that I've had this side gig representing romance novel authors. And often, it takes me a while to find out what their real name is, because they're writing under a pen name. So I've had that happen where I later found out what their real name was. Sounds a bit dodger than romance. All right. Yeah. So tangential question on here. Tangential question on consequences. US lawyers cannot talk about a lot of stuff. What if I come to you, pay you with our relationship and everything, and you give me advice, and I personally package it as a general advice without mentioning ever that I spoke to you and so on and so forth. What are the consequences to me, if any? Do you want to know? No, it's OK. So this is something I've come across quite a lot, actually. I find it quite interesting. So only lawyers can give legal advice. No, something's probably going to tell me that's not right. But yeah, Andrew's shaking his head. I've obviously got it wrong already. But you can't sell legal advice unless you meet certain rules. So a number of companies, is that not what you're asking me? So he doesn't want you. He doesn't want you. He's OK. He's OK. So pass it to me right now, because I think it's OK. No, I just understood your question. Sorry, I understand your question to be, I give you advice. You pay me, and then you pass the same advice on to someone else, but you don't want to get paid. Sorry, what? He just publishes it. So this is what I tried to get into before, right? You, assuming you're not a lawyer, you're not allowed to give legal advice. So it would actually be a breach of this law, which then. Actually, you know what? I've never bothered to look into that, because it doesn't affect me. But I can try and look it up in parallel if you want to, or we can have a discussion about it after. Yeah, there's one other issue, which is that you'd be waving your, by disclosing that there's a possibility that our communications would become non-privileged from you publicizing the advice that you got. You want to see? OK, maybe I'll let you explain. My question is actually a follow-on to this one. You talk quite a bit about that privileged client communication, and in an open source project that raises all sorts of problems. We're dealing with GDPR issues in our project, and some community members say, our lawyer says, you have to. And I say, if you can't share the legal argument, we're going to ignore you. But now I'm hearing that's probably the bad. That's not a good way to approach that. Why did they just get you to speak to their lawyer? So I need to talk to this specific lawyer, for each of these representatives, instead of them publishing it to the community, for the community to evaluate as a whole? Depends on what you're doing. So if you create guidelines or something, you do it with the lawyer, and they can be published. Lots and lots of sites have guidelines. Or if the lawyers are all telling their clients who are then talking together, why not just get those lawyers together and have them hash it out if they want, get the lawyers in the room all together. One other thing is there can be an attorney-client relationship between a lawyer and an unincorporated group of people. Let's call them software developers. So you can have a relationship with an unincorporated association of people. And so you could have one lawyer if the project wanted to hire one lawyer. You could have one lawyer and then hire them and kind of follow that advice instead of having 30 lawyers tell you through their representatives what they should do. Do you want to? No, I'm good. OK. We have another question. Another question. Oh, another question? I've got a question about legal and professional privilege. What do you do in the case where the lawyer actually doesn't have a clue without consulting a specialist? So for example, it's incredibly rare for a lawyer to have a clear idea of the edges of artificial intelligence or indeed what privacy law means because actually it's half computer science. What do you think we should do? I've got a feeling we're being set up here. Yeah. Well, where does the privilege? You don't actually know where you go without kind of disclosing the problem you're working on. And I get this quite a bit. And so we have a chat with a lawyer and suddenly turns into a very specific chat about, hypothetically, if some group had this very, very specific problem, what does computer science say? And all of a sudden I'm thinking, so, am I accidentally on the team? Do you know, I don't know if I can quite answer what you're trying to ask me, but it's really interesting because a lot of what you're doing isn't going to be subject to legal privilege. It's only the legal advice that is. So you have all these conversations around commercial stuff or technology stuff which aren't privileged anyway. But also, a lot of the legal issues that come up don't need legal fixes. They just need a better understanding of the technology to fix it. So usually, you'll be the answer, not us. I'm sure you are. Me. Yeah. Yeah, so just to kind of follow on to that, there can be privilege. Now, you should be getting paid by the lawyers who are seeking your free technical advice in the bar or whatever. But as a lawyer, if I retain a technical consultant for a variety of reasons, that can be subject to privilege. If that technical consultant is helping me gather information about that I need in order to help my client make or advise my client about legal issues, that can be that can be privileged in the United States at least. But I just thought you meant something entirely wrong. Hey, I found the legal advice point interesting. And I was wondering, do you consider this movement in license obligations and publishing license obligations like explaining what license, what you should do if you have software under a specific license published? Do you consider this legal advice or how is the situation there? Well, at least that's my understanding. It doesn't say specifically for this and this and this type of software, this is what you need to do. But it just generally lists what the license obligations are, kind of extracting it and then making a list from it and giving different options, correct? So it's still just a general statement and not giving specific advice about a very specific scenario. You would need to say for this software, that in practice means this. And that would be the legal advice. But as long as you're just generally saying these are the license obligations under whichever license you pick, you're still on the general statement side. I just wanted to clarify, I'm a lawyer who's qualified in England and Wales. I just wanted to clarify that in England and Wales there's nothing preventing anyone from giving general legal advice. So it's not something that's reserved to lawyers. We didn't follow up on that. But if you hold yourself out to be a solicitor, you're required to meet certain regulations. Absolutely. Yeah, precisely. No, exactly. It's where I was going. I'm just clarifying that. Yeah. So it's not a good idea to seek legal advice from somebody who isn't qualified. Because first of all, you won't attract privilege. You won't have all of the whole raft of legal compliance that they need to undergo, regulatory compliance, et cetera. And probably most importantly, it's very difficult for people who aren't qualified lawyers to get any insurance. So the chances are the person you're dealing with won't have insurance. But nothing that I do requires me to be a lawyer. So the sort of things that you, if I'm conducting litigation, if I'm buying and selling houses, if I'm ministering oaths, all these sort of weird things, I have to be a lawyer to do those. But I don't do any of that stuff. So the situation is much more lax in England and Wales. But I do have a question for the panel, which is, before you do, you won't get insurance for it. People are making an observation, which means that I sort of do a number of other things. I'm involved as a director of an organization that provides compliance advice and also software company. In each of your jurisdictions, are there any restrictions that you as a lawyer have from participating in the management of other businesses? Why don't you explain that for the UK since you asked the question, Andrew? Well, the answer is no, basically. I'm already doing it. No, I'm doing it. Yeah, both of us will try to duck. So there are, I think, specific situations. And maybe Dustin will be able to fill that. So there are rules about who can own a law firm. So we can't share ownership of a law firm with anyone who is not a lawyer also. There are also rules about taking a share of a start-up comes to you and says, gee, I'm going to give you 10% rather than power. You'll give me reduced fee or whatever. And I personally don't do that. So I don't know what the rules are. But it is kind of a tricky situation because you put yourself in. There's a high potential for, this is why I don't do it. It's a high potential for putting yourself in a conflict that whereas a lawyer, there may be one thing that it would be advisable for the company to do. But as a shareholder, you might want a different outcome. So it's generally, you're setting yourself up for conflict if you do that. Those are kind of the two things that come to mind in the US right after. I would say it's the same. Yeah, our rules are the same. And they make you, if you have shares, you sometimes have to sell them blind. So you just have to give them to a broker who randomly sells them rather than be able to pick and choose when you would do it. It's not really worth the hassle. See, I would say the same thing. The issue is really with the conflict of interests because there's rules around that. You can't represent conflicting interests in any case. And I think in a situation like that, you just risk getting in such a conflict one way or the other. Not that we're accusing you of doing that at all. No, I just wanted to say, that's fine if you're a shareholder in a software company, you say, but I'm not your lawyer. As long as you keep them distinct, then I think that is fine. And I'm just going to agree with that. I wouldn't do both the lawyer's role and I said a business director's role at the same time because you need balance and check. It's not right. Yeah. So no, I know there's another question. We'll get to that in just a second. I wanted to follow up a little bit. We mentioned, we touched on conflict of interest here. How much does that apply? So for example, if you do volunteer work with a foundation, for example, and then they wind up having some kind of legal dispute with a company, can you later represent that company? Are there any circumstances where you could? Anyone want to answer that? In the US, I'm going to click just to give you that. I know we've had this credit. The answer is it depends. But yeah, you do have duties to a former client. If the knowledge you have is material, from that prior representation is material to the new representation or the new matter, that can cause a conflict. But generally, you might be able to do that. Go ahead. No. Same. Didn't have anything to add to that. Same adjournment? All good. OK. Thanks for the session. As usually, top notch sessions here, we know. OK, maybe it's possible I got it wrong. So it's a follow up question of the follow up question. And the scenario is I got legal advice. I need to spread this information with my community somehow. But as far as I can understand, there is some degree of confidentiality even client to the site. So since I can't give legal advice, I can't spread it to some degree. Would you mind to clarify this point, because it wasn't clear. So you're receiving the advice, though, right? I am receiving the advice. I wish to spread the advice since it's community wise advice. And so you are telling us there is some confidentiality client side. Well, for Germany, that's not, I mean, you're not. I'm in Germany, by the way. OK. You're not bound by confidentiality about anything relating to your case. So if you want to waive confidentiality, that's fine. But the obligation is on the lawyer to not talk about the case that maybe you and I discussed. So that's a confidentiality obligation. What I think they were saying, and I would find that to be true in general, if you are talking about the advice that I gave you, you need to be aware of the fact that you're waiving confidentiality, which then again might affect what everyone else needs to keep secret, or what could be looked into. That doesn't affect the fact that you can still make that decision and say, I'm going to talk about whatever I want to talk about from this relationship that we had. Just picking up on that, I think privilege is a little bit more than confidentiality. And it also gives you the right not to have something disclosed in a litigation process, potentially, which is broader than confidentiality might be. And I've seen a couple of issues with it. Partly you sharing it loses that privilege, and later on you might want to have it back, and you can't get it back. And the other thing, it's very difficult. As a lawyer, you never want to seem like you're closing people in the community down. But when there is some sort of litigation, say around patents, whatever is then discussed in these open news groups can be used, and not always by the right side, to help influence a case. So when the litigation starts, it's worth at least thinking hard about what you write down, and whether you would want that to be used in court, maybe against what you actually believe in. Yeah, I wanted to use the patent example as a really good one, as an example. So the client, it is the client who may waive the privilege. So there is this privilege that an attorney cannot be forced in court to tell anything about what their client told them. But the client can waive that. And the way that this typically happens in patent litigation is a company comes to a lawyer and says, we've been accused of infringement. We want an opinion. They get a written opinion that says, no, we don't believe you're infringing. And so they behave on that advice. They continue what they're doing. They then get sued. So this then becomes this really, really complicated dance in the United States about when you waive the privilege. Because they can say, if they say, well, we had an opinion from our lawyer that says, we don't infringe. They may have just waived the privilege. Then the other side gets to see that letter, see what was in that letter, see whether it was accurate. And so same thing can happen on a mailing list. It's a public mailing list. Say it's an internal mailing list, memo list, for those of you at Red Hat never been worked at Red Hat. If someone were on the mailing, were on memo list and said, hey, good news. The legal department told us it's OK to go ahead. That may have waived privilege for the company. And then all of that information comes out in the litigation. So that's to just paint a picture of how this waiver works and why attorneys get freaked. Yes, it's the clients to waive. But before you waive it, you better be really sure you understand what the consequences of that waiver might be. And as Amanda said, you might want it back at some. You can't get it back once it's gone. It's gone. I'd follow on that just by saying I agree with everything you said about it. You have to really think about whether or not you want to waive it. But I'd also say there might be a situation where it doesn't matter if you waive it or not. Maybe it's some innocuous advice that you find innocuous. You can talk to your lawyer about, hey, what are the consequences? How bad would it be if I waive the privilege? Because I want to share this with my community. And the lawyer might say, well, it doesn't really seem like a big deal. Or you might decide it's not a big deal. And it's your decision to make. Oh, we have time for one more? OK. Just want to say thank you very much for this panel. I think we should have more of these panels. It's been a privilege to be here. Buttering us up. Thank you. So I'm really interested. I'm hearing a lot of legalistic arguments to justify ethical behavior. Sort of makes sense, your lawyers, right? I'm just wondering where you don't think these professional legal responsibilities in terms of ethical behaviors go far enough. Because, I mean, in some senses, ethics should be a sort of human universal, right? And so in Germany, it's this utterly fascinating. But in a sense, it doesn't capture what personal ethics are, things like that. I mean, for example, when you touched on, you know you can just quit if you don't like what you're being asked of. Can you talk more in that area? Because I think that's fascinating. Not you quitting, but thank you. And thank you again. I actually think that at least the model rules in the US have something that speaks almost directly to this, which is a lot of people use legal departments or lawyer just to be like, hey, can I do this? And the lawyer's like, yeah, I don't see why not. And they're like, OK, great, see you later. I just want to make sure that I'm not violating the law. But the ethical rules permit you, explicitly permit you, to not only consider what the law is, but also to consider moral, political, economic, and social obligations when you are making a decision. And that's something they permit. And I believe it's a lawyer's duty to do that when faced with difficult decisions. The problem with that is that everybody's personal ethics are going to be different, right? So if you're leaving it to an arbitrary decision that you make yourself, it is going to be different. And I guess, so just sidetracking slightly, we work in a community as lawyers in open source where we collaborate and share and perhaps work together more than you would see most lawyers doing. But we choose to do that because we sort of work with these community values. And I think you'll find lawyers in this area probably have slightly different views on what is right and what is ethical than maybe in other areas. Please, I think we were out of time. But we can continue this discussion another time. Let's give a huge round of applause to our lawyers. Great work. Thank you so much.