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64 Misc. 285

Richards v. Richards

New York Supreme Court

Decided August 15, 1909

New York Supreme Court · decided 1909-08-15

Action for separation. Motion therein to compel the defendant’s attorney to disclose his client’s place of residence for the purposes of service upon the latter of an order requiring him to pay counsel fees and alimony pendente lite.

Key passage — most relied on by later courts

“collateral to the subject of the attorney's professional employment.”

quoted by 1 later decision, including 191 N.J. Super. 73 - Fellerman v. Bradley

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1909-08-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 15 later decisions — most recently November 1987

15 state decisions

60190919101920193019401950196019701980decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

Bischoff, J.

¶1Section 835 of the Code of Civil Procedure does not protect against disclosure every communication which the client may choose to make to his attorney under a pledge of secrecy. It protects only such communications as the • client may make not pending the attorney’s professional employment, but "in the course of it.” To come within the protective provisions alluded to, therefore, the communication must be one essentially confidential and relate to the subject-matter upon which the attorney’s advice was given or may be sought. Such communication to the attorney of the client’s place of abode or residence is not, nor is the concealment of the subject-matter of such a communication, essential t; *286the attorney’s counsel or advice. Indeed, if the attorney is to communicate with his client by correspondence the disclosure of the latter’s whereabouts would follow and its non-confidential character be obvious. Such a communication, also, is wholly collateral to the subject of the attorney’s professional employment. The attorney’s promise of concealment of his client’s whereabouts could therefore have had in view nothing more than to keep the knowledge of such whereabouts from a particular person — the plaintiff —• and that in order to support the defendant in his defiance of the order which directs him to pay alimony and counsel fees made in his wife’s action for divorce. The court’s countenance of the attorney’s promise under such circumstances would mean nothing short of giving its aid to the defendant in his contemptuous attitude toward itself, and under the provisions of section 457 of the Penal Code the attorney’s promise to conceal his client’s whereabouts for the purposes alluded to comes dangerously near to being a crime, the promise being in effect “ a combination with another to resist ” the court’s mandate. I can perceive no valid reason for changing or modifying my decision that the defendant’s attorney should disclose the defendant’s present whereabouts.

¶2Ordered accordingly.

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