INTRODUCTION

The term ‘conflicts of interest’ covers many different circumstances. Chapter 15 of the Guide to Professional Conduct divides conflicts into two forms:

1. solicitors acting where their own interests are involved (personal conflicts);

2.

In this book I am concerned only with the second category—which means that the Law Society’s classification does not advance matters as far as this study is concerned. The former category, sometimes referred to as ‘fair dealing’ con­flicts, includes such matters as gifts to solicitors and the making of appoint­ments. The Law Society’s rules reflect the common law principles that an agent must not let his own interests conflict with those of his principal and that he must always put the principal’s interest before his own.^[83] These rules are of fundamental importance for legal practitioners.^[84] In itself the guidance is straightforward and easy to comprehend. That is not to say, of course, that difficulties do not arise in practice. But fair dealing conflicts are a separate topic, with many ramifications. These cannot be dealt with adequately in a work which is concerned essentially with exploring solicitors’ competing responsibil­ities to different clients.

A more useful classification for the purpose of this particular study is the attempt to analyse the topic by reference to the subject matter of the conflict. Finn divides conflicts into four types:

1. same matter conflicts;

2. former matter conflicts;

3. separate matter conflicts;

4. fair dealing conflicts.^[85]

An alternative method, and one employed by Glover,^[86] is to classify conflicts on a temporal basis, that is to say, according to when the duties of the solicitor arise. Either one duty precedes the other—for example, where the solicitor rep­resents one client and then takes on another with conflicting interests, in which case the conflict is ‘successive’, or the duties arise more or less at the same time— for example, where the solicitor acts for more than one party in the same trans­action, in which case the conflict is ‘simultaneous’.

As we shall see, solicitors themselves tend to classify conflicts in a similar manner to Finn, namely by reference to subject matter.^[87] The City of London Law Society, for example, in reviewing the conflict rules for the Law Society,^[88] found it helpful to adopt Finn’s approach and categorise conflicts by different degrees of severity or ‘directness’.^[89] Whilst there is much to commend this approach, and it will be used later in this book, for ease of handling material, and in order to gain an historical perspective, in this chapter my analysis will be based around Glover’s distinction between ‘successive’ and ‘simultaneous’ con­flicts. It is this distinction which offers the best route into the subject, providing as it does a convenient framework for reviewing the courts’ response to conflict situations over the best part of a hundred years.