A Conflict of Interest by Adam Mitzner

on the next flight down. In the meantime, go home. Send an email to the employees telling them the office is closed and that they’ll get another email later when it opens. Michael, this is important. That’s all the email should say. No explanations. Just that the office is closed. Understand?”
    He speaks more quietly now. “There’s never going to be another email, is there?”
    “Not likely,” I say.
    “Who was that?” Elizabeth says when I roll over to return the phone to the holder.
    “Ohlig. They’ve executed a search warrant at his office in Florida. I need to get down there right away.”
    “Have you told your mother that you’re representing him?”
    “No.”
    “Don’t you think you should, especially if you’re going down there?”
    Elizabeth is an honesty-is-the-best-policy type of person. That outlook works well in her chosen vocation: Elizabeth is an artist, a talented painter, to be specific, though she hasn’t actually painted anything since Charlotte was born. I used to joke with her that I never understood how someone with her worldview could possibly have ended up married to a lawyer. Her standard response was that she didn’t marry a lawyer; she married a man who practices law when he’s at the office.
    “He’s asked me not to,” I say, and leave it at that, sparing her the blather about how my professional obligations trump any notions of honesty that exist in the non-lawyer world. “I’ll just tell my mother that I’m down there on a case. She never asks about what I’m working on.”
    “Are you leaving now?” Elizabeth asks, as I roll out of bed.
    “As soon as I can,” I say. “Go back to sleep. I’ll call you from Florida tonight.”
    I walk into the kitchen and fill the coffeemaker before dialing Abby from my BlackBerry. She answers on the third ring. I can tell that I’ve woken her.
    “Michael Ohlig just called. The FBI has apparently executed a search warrant at his office. I told him to close up shop and wait for the cavalry, and by that I mean you and me. Can you call the office and have someone book us on the earliest flight we can make to West Palm, and get us rooms at the Four Seasons?”
    “Sure,” she says, the standard associate response. “How many nights?”
    “One should do it, I think.”
    “Okay.”
    Despite the fact that we’ve already produced more than a million pages pursuant to the subpoena, the government executed a search warrant because they still think Ohlig is holding stuff back. It’s an odd anomaly about discovery in a white collar criminal prosecution—the stakes couldn’t be higher and the accused is the accused because the government believes he doesn’t follow the rules, and yet discovery is still governed, for the most part, by an honor policy. When the prosecution can persuade a judge that they have probable cause thatdocuments have been improperly withheld, they can do the collection themselves via a search warrant.
    “Do you think there’s something we didn’t turn over?” I ask Abby.
    A foolish question. If she thought there was something we hadn’t turned over, she would have asked Ohlig for it and then she would have produced it to the government. In essence, I’m asking her to tell me if she knows of something she didn’t know.
    “Not unless he was holding back on us,” she says.
    “I suppose that’ll be the first question we ask once we’re down there. Email me ASAP with the flight information. I’ll meet you at the gate.”
    “Mind if I ask a stupid question?”
    “Is this when I’m supposed to say that there’s no such thing as a stupid question?”
    “What are we going to do once we’re down there? I mean, if they’ve already executed the search warrant, what can we do about that now? It’s a little like closing the barn door after the horse gets out, isn’t it?”
    “We’re putting in a personal appearance to tell Michael Ohlig that everything is going to be okay. Even though we know it’s