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A client goes into a lawyer’s office and asks the lawyer how she can keep real estate out of the hands of her husband. She gets advice about that situation. The communication, the request for, and the giving of advice between the client and the lawyer are privileged. It will not ever be disclosed to anyone.11
A client goes into a lawyer’s office and instructs the lawyer to transfer real estate from herself to buyer X. That communication is merely confidential. It relates to a fact or an act, but not to advice. The lawyer has a professional obligation not to tell the gossip columnist for the local newspaper that the client has sold this property and that she got two million dollars for it. But the communication between the lawyer and the client is not, in traditional terms, privileged. It is only confidential.12
Lawyers do not cease to be regarded as professional legal advisors simply because they are employed by their clients, but in the nature of things those who are employed in that capacity are more likely than independent practitioners to become involved in aspects of the business that are essentially managerial or administrative in nature.
The action of transacting or fact of being transacted, the carrying on or completion of any action or course of action, the accomplishment of a result.
the feeling or state of mind of one who suspects; imagination or conjecture of the existence of something evil or wrong without proof, apprehension of guilt or fault on slight grounds or without clear evidence; imagination of something (not necessarily evil) as possible or likely; a slight belief or idea of something, or that something is the case; a surmise; a faint notion; an inkling: surmise of something future; expectation….a slight or faint trace, very small amount, hint, suggestion (of something).
Suspicion in its ordinary meaning is a state of conjecture or surmise where proof is lacking. ‘I suspect but I cannot prove’. Suspicion arises at or near the starting point of any investigation of which the obtaining of prima facie proof is the end.34
Where a person has a real suspicion and deliberately refrains from making inquiries to determine whether it is groundless, where he or she sees red (or perhaps amber) lights flashing but chooses to ignore them, it cannot be said that there is an absence of knowledge of what is suspected or warned against.
Notaries and independent legal professionals…should be made subject to the provisions of the Directive when participating in financial or corporate transactions, including providing tax advice, where there is the greatest risk of the services of those legal professionals being misused for the purpose of laundering the proceeds of criminal activity.