Attacking the attorney-client privilege, once a rare legal tactic, has become a standard tool of government lawyers these days and a cause for increasing concern among corporate defense attorneys.
In the latest flexing of the federal government's muscle to pierce attorney-client privilege, the Treasury Department is trying to force the Dallas-based law firm of Jenkens & Gilchrist to reveal the names of more than 600 clients who used certain tax shelters that the Internal Revenue Service considers abusive. The IRS wants to audit the investors . . . .
[S]ome lawyers, including those of Jenkens & Gilchrist, are fighting back. They accuse the government of moving dangerously close to damaging the centuries-old privilege that lies at the heart of this country's adversarial legal system.
This troubling development is apparently an offshoot of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the National Law Journal report here.