Southern Baptist lawyer resigns amid loss of attorney-client privilege in sex abuse inquiry
After 56 years representing the Southern Baptist Convention and its executive committee, the legal counsel for the largest Protestant denomination in the country resigned.
Guenther, Jordan, & Price, a law firm based in Springfield, TN, notified Ronnie Floyd, executive committee president and CEO, in a letter on Monday morning.
The decision followed an executive committee vote in a special meeting Oct. 5 to waive attorney-client privilege for a third-party investigation into the executive committee’s handling of sexual abuse claims.
The firm said attorney-client privilege is an essential aspect of the legal service it provides, allowing clients to “communicate with their legal counsel freely and confidentially.”
“The decision (to waive privilege) causes us to carefully consider the prospect of moving forward as we try to represent the Executive Committee and the Convention in an alien environment,” wrote attorneys Jim Guenther and James Jordan.
The law firm’s resignation is the latest fallout from the committee’s vote to waive privilege, with 10 executive committee members resigning over the past week and a half.
“With deep regrets, we accept their decision and fully understand their reasoning behind it and their need to withdraw,” Floyd said in an emailed statement.
In a phone call Monday, Guenther said he knew it was possible that his firm would terminate its decades-long contract with the SBC and executive committee ever since the convention’s messengers, or voting delegates, authorized the investigation at the SBC annual meeting in June. As part of that motion, the messengers directed the executive committee to waive attorney-client privilege. The convention and executive committee first hired Guenther in 1966.
By waiving attorney-client privilege, Guidepost Solutions, the investigator, can review privileged communications and legal memos between Guenther, Jordan, & Price, and executive committee officers and members over the past 21years, if the privileged materials are relevant to the scope of the investigation.
The executive committee, which handles denomination business when the full convention isn’t in session, voted three times on waiving privilege in recent meetings. It voted against waiving privilege the first two times, but passed it the third time.
Those who opposed waiving privilege expressed concern about the impact on the convention’s insurance. The executive committee hired a second law firm to offer guidance on waiving privilege, a representative of which told the executive committee at the Oct. 5 meeting that he had never heard of a client waiving attorney-client privilege.
Other executive committee members, sexual abuse survivors, and other Southern Baptist leaders and pastors across the U.S., however, said the committee had to waive privilege to comply with the messengers’ will. Proponents of waiving privilege said it was necessary to ensure a fully transparent investigation.
Guenther and his colleagues felt differently. “We believe we made the decision that is correct from the standpoint of the professional ethics and our own firm’s standards,” Guenther told The Tennessean.
In the letter to Floyd, the attorneys said that now privilege has been waived in this instance, they cannot promise that future communications with the executive committee and SBC personnel “will be secure.”
Also, the firm pushed back against the prevailing sentiment that waiving privilege will benefit the investigation. “The attorney-client privilege has been portrayed by some as an evil device by which misconduct is somehow allowed to be secreted so wrongdoers can escape justice and defeat the legal rights of others,” the letter said. “There is nothing sinister about it. It does not corrupt justice; it creates the space for justice.”
Bruce Frank, chair of the SBC sexual abuse task force, which is overseeing the investigation and has helped lead the charge to waive privilege, said the task force doesn’t have a comment about Guenther, Jordan, & Price’s resignation.
Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him at ladams@tennessean.com or on Twitter @liamsadams.