Torts/Personal Injury,
Ethics/Professional Responsibility
Mar. 19, 2024
Confidentiality and common carriers – the Boeing fiasco
The confidentiality rule for lawyers, which allows but does not require disclosure of information to prevent death or substantial bodily harm, may need to be revised for common carriers like Boeing.
Carol M. Langford
Langford is a lawyer who provides legal ethics advice and counsel and handles State Bar defense matters. She is an adjunct professor of ethics and served on the Commission for the Revision of the Rules of Professional Conduct.
A growing number of in-flight issues on its aircraft have made Boeing the target of FFA inspections and questions about where the ethical buck stops for Boeing’s lawyers. The list of incidents includes two fatal crashes outside the U.S., one in October 2018 and one in March 2019 killing a total of 346 passengers. In more recent incidents a plane made a “sudden movement” read: a hard drop in mid-flight injuring 50 people; an emergency exit door on another plane blew op...