The American Bar Association (ABA) is to establish a high-level task force on financial services regulation in response to the crisis on Wall Street.

In an exclusive interview with the Gazette, President Tommy Wells said the initiative is partly aimed at defending the principle of self-regulation and combating any renewed threat to attorney-client privilege. The 15-strong task force is likely to include senior lawyers with experience of government and former commissioners at markets watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the post-9/11, Enron and Sarbanes-Oxley Act period, the ABA was forced on to the defensive as US regulators adopted increasingly aggressive positions that were seen to jeopardise attorney-client communications. Wells fears history may be about to repeat itself.

‘One thing I am determined to do is maintain the independence of the profession, both from a self-regulation standpoint, and also in respect of attorney-client privilege,’ he said. ‘Under Sarbanes-Oxley there were regulations that could have turned lawyers into whistleblowers, obliging them to report on their own clients, which would have been a very big intrusion on privilege.

‘We were able to convince [the politicians] that the regulations they were proposing were not in the best interests of either the profession or the government.’