New Jersey’s Rules of Professional Conduct prohibit an attorney from accepting the payment of fees from anyone other than a client except under certain well defined circumstances. 

Recently, New Jersey’s Supreme Court addressed the question of whether a company that was the target of a grand jury investigation could engage and pay attorneys to represent their employees who had been subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury.  In that case, the court answered the question affirmatively with the following conditions: (a) that the client provides his/her informed consent to the potential conflict; (b) that the payor is prohibited from interfering with the lawyer’s professional responsibility to the client; (c) that there can be no current attorney/client relationship between the lawyer and the payor; (d) that the lawyer cannot communicate information received from the client to the payor; (e) that the payor must pay the attorney’s invoices faithfully and timely; and (f)  that the payor’s responsibility to pay the lawyer cannot be relieved absent a court order returned on a formal motion with notice to all relevant parties.