Concept
Compelled Disclosure
Disclosure required by law or court order, and for conflict checks
Compelled Disclosure
Rule 1.6(b)(6) lets a lawyer reveal information relating to the representation "to comply with other law or a court order."1 The exception exists because two commands can collide. Rule 1.6(a) tells the lawyer to stay silent, while a statute, a regulation, or a judge may tell the same lawyer to speak. Without paragraph (b)(6), compliance would breach confidentiality and refusal would defy the outside authority, so the lawyer would be in violation either way. The exception removes that trap by treating the outside command as a justification: the lawyer who obeys it is not disciplined for doing so.
Paragraph (b)(6) grants permission and imposes no duty. Like every other exception in paragraph (b), it allows the lawyer to speak and never requires it. Any duty to speak comes from the statute, regulation, or order, and the confidentiality rule simply steps aside. The verb "comply" makes the same point from the other direction. The exception answers a command, so the lawyer's own wish to disclose, or an adversary's informal request, does not set it in motion.2
The text names two triggers, and they differ in where the command originates. "Other law" covers requirements that bind the lawyer by their own force, such as a statute or regulation demanding information. A "court order" is a directive from a tribunal to a particular lawyer in a particular matter, and it raises a practical question the first trigger does not: what the lawyer should do before complying. Both triggers share one ceiling. The command fixes how much the lawyer may reveal, and anything beyond it has no justification. The first trigger comes first.
Other Law Requiring Disclosure
"Other law" in Rule 1.6(b)(6) reaches legal requirements that originate outside the ethics rules, and a statute and an administrative regulation are the clearest examples.3 The same legal system licenses lawyers and enacts the statutes that bind them, which is why the exception is needed. If a lawyer who obeyed a disclosure statute could be disciplined for breaching confidentiality, the system would punish compliance. If a lawyer who honored Rule 1.6 could be sanctioned under the statute, it would punish silence. Paragraph (b)(6) resolves the collision in favor of the outside command, so the lawyer who complies commits no confidentiality violation.
The exception clears the way for compliance but does not create the duty to disclose. Because paragraph (b) is permissive throughout, the obligation to speak must come from the statute or regulation itself, and that law must actually require the disclosure. A disciplinary rule quoted in GTE Products Corp. v. Stewart rested on the same idea of compulsion: it allowed a lawyer to reveal confidences or secrets that were "required by law or court order."4 The analysis therefore runs in a fixed order. The lawyer first identifies a real legal requirement to disclose, and only then asks how much of the client's information that requirement calls for.
The professional conduct rules themselves show where a duty to speak can originate. In narrow circumstances, Rules 3.3 and 4.1 require a lawyer to reveal information that Rule 1.6 would otherwise protect, when necessary to prevent or correct client fraud against a tribunal or another person.5 Rule 4.1(b), for instance, forbids a lawyer from knowingly failing to disclose a material fact to a third person when disclosure is necessary to avoid assisting a client's criminal or fraudulent act, when Rule 1.6 permits it.6 Both rules are taught elsewhere. They appear here only to show that a duty to speak always traces to the rule or law that imposes it, since paragraph (b) grants permission and nothing more.
The first step screens out requests that carry no legal force. An investigator who telephones a lawyer to ask about a client's business dealings, citing no statute, subpoena, or order, has made only a request. Nothing obliges the lawyer to answer, so paragraph (b)(6) has no command to comply with, and Rule 1.6(a) continues to bind unless the client consents or a different exception fits.7
The memo shows the scope limit at work. The compelling law is the measuring stick: the statute defines what must be said, and so it defines what the lawyer has cover to say. Beyond those facts the client's interest in confidence is untouched, because no outside command reaches the memo. Without that limit, any narrow reporting statute would license handing over the whole file.
Fact patterns usually hide the error at step two or step four. An informal inquiry fails at step two, because no law requires an answer. An over-inclusive report fails at step four, because the law's demand sets the limit of the lawyer's justification.
Court Orders
The second trigger in Rule 1.6(b)(6) is "a court order," which the rule pairs with other law in permitting disclosure "to comply with other law or a court order."9 The word "order" ties the exception to a ruling by a tribunal, a decision directed to a particular lawyer that particular information must be disclosed. An ethics rule that forbade compliance with such a ruling would set the profession's rules against the judiciary. Paragraph (b)(6) prevents that standoff by treating the order as a justification for disclosure. As with every paragraph (b) exception, the rule supplies only permission, and the force of the command comes from the order itself.
Because the exception follows a ruling, the sequence of events matters. A subpoena or discovery request is an adversary's demand, usually made before any judge has considered whether the information is protected, so the lawyer should not treat it as a final order. The lawyer instead asserts the protections that apply, the attorney-client privilege foremost, because the privilege carries immunity from legally compelled disclosure.10 Only when a court rejects those objections and directs disclosure does paragraph (b)(6) permit the lawyer to comply.11
Two layers of protection explain why a court's ruling does so much work here. Confidential information is defined broadly to include all information the lawyer holds that relates to the representation, but it is subject to several exceptions and may carry no immunity from legal process. The privilege covers a narrower set, only certain communications between lawyer and client, but it has fewer exceptions and does protect against legally compelled disclosure.12 Blurring the layers produces two errors. Concluding that information falls outside the privilege does not by itself permit the lawyer to reveal it, because the broader duty persists until an exception applies. Concluding that information is confidential does not let the lawyer refuse a court's order, because (b)(6) was written to resolve that conflict.
The crime-fraud exception shows the layers coming apart. A party seeking communications under that exception must make a prima facie showing that they were in furtherance of an intended or present illegality, and must show some relationship between the communications and the illegality.13 The exception reaches communications that are intended to advance, or actually do advance, the client's illicit purpose, and after-the-fact evidence of the crime or fraud is not enough.14 Once a judge finds the showing made, the privilege no longer shields the communications from legal process. The duty of confidentiality, however, is a separate layer whose exceptions are written on their own terms. A communication can therefore fall outside the privilege while no paragraph (b) exception reaches it, which leaves the lawyer holding information that a court may compel but that the ethics rules forbid the lawyer to reveal voluntarily.
That gap is why the ethics exceptions, standing alone, generally allow only non-testimonial disclosure for a purpose outside the courtroom, unless an exception to confidentiality happens to align with an exception to the privilege.15 The court-order exception closes the gap at the moment it matters. A ruling that the privilege does not protect the communications, followed by an order to testify, supplies both the evidentiary clearance and the ethical permission.16 The order also measures the permission. A lawyer directed to produce one specified document has legal cover for that document only.