Chinese wall
[3] The term was popularized in the United States following the stock market crash of 1929, when the U.S. government legislated information separation between investment bankers and brokerage firms, in order to limit the conflict of interest between objective company analysis and the desire for successful initial public offerings.
A leading note on the subject published in 1980 in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review titled "The Chinese Wall Defense to Law-Firm Disqualification" perpetuated the use of the term.
[citation needed] In Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. v. Superior Court (1988), Presiding Justice Harry W. Low, a Chinese American,[7] wrote a concurring opinion specifically in order "to express my profound objection to the use of this phrase in this context".
He called the term a "piece of legal flotsam which should be emphatically abandoned", and suggested "ethics wall" as a more suitable alternative.
[10] The ABA Model Rules define screening as "the isolation of a lawyer from any participation in a matter through the timely imposition of procedures within a firm that are reasonably adequate under the circumstances to protect information that the isolated lawyer is obligated to protect under these Rules or other law",[10][11][12][full citation needed][13] and suitable "screening procedures" have been approved where paralegals have moved from one law firm to another and have worked on cases for their former employer which may conflict with the interests of their current employer and the clients they represent.
The "wall" is thrown up to prevent leaks of corporate inside information, which could influence the advice given to clients making investments, and allow staff to take advantage of facts that are not yet known to the general public.
The U.S. government has since passed laws strengthening the use ethics walls such as Title V of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act in order to prevent such conflicts of interest.
Under UK law, a firm may represent competing parties in a suit, but only in strictly defined situations and when individual fee earners do not act for both sides.
They are, however, still used in conjunction with requests from clients as a condition of waivers, or as a prudential measure within the firm to prevent or address potential business issues.
A reverse engineered driver offers access to development, by persons outside the company that manufactured it, of the general hardware usage.
There is a case-law mechanism called "clean room design" that is employed to avoid copyright infringement when reverse engineering a proprietary driver.
