Navigating the Conflicts of Interest facing the Municipal Attorney Responsible for Police Misconduct Litigation

In cases involving alleged police misconduct, civil suits seeking damages are usually brought against individual officers under Title 42, United States Code, section 1983, though sometimes units of local government employing the officers are also named as defendants. The unit of government that employs the officer is usually obligated to provide a defense for the officer-defendant, and to indemnify the officer for legal costs, including the payment of judgments and settlements of actions arising from the scope of employment. Individual officers named as defendants accordingly are represented by attorneys whose fiduciary obligations run to the officer, not the municipality or other governmental entity that employs the officer. These attorneys have an ethical obligation to keep evidence of their clients’ misconduct from their clients’ employers, even if this leads to expensive settlements paid by the employer. Thus, there is a serious potential conflict of interest between the interests of the individual officer named as a defendant that the officer’s employer, raising important issues of both ethics and public policy. This presentation will outline those conflicts and suggest how they may be best navigated by municipal attorneys, even when they must hire or supervise attorneys representing individual officers entitled to indemnity, while also protecting the interests of their governmental client.

Speaker: Lawrence Rosenthal