Indemnification Clauses and Defining the Relationship
An attorney client-relationship can arise from something far less definite than an explicit agreement between the attorney and his or her client, warns Robert J. Glowacki Jr. in a post for Poyner Spruill LLP.
He explains:
“In the recently decided Friday Invs., LLC v. Bally Total Fitness of the Mid-Atl., Inc., the North Carolina Supreme Court found the existence of an attorney-client relationship under circumstances where neither party explicitly discussed legal representation. There, the central question was whether an attorney-client relationship exists between a defendant to a lawsuit and a non-party that contractually agreed to indemnify that defendant and, if so, whether correspondence between the two is protected by the attorney-client privilege.”
