Thomas Spahn has practiced as a commercial litigator at McGuireWoods since 1977. As a partner in McGuireWoods' Business and Securities Litigation department, he regularly advises a number of Fortune 500 companies on ethics matters, properly creating and preserving attorney client privilege and work product protection, and other issues.
Mr. Spahn has served on the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, as the Reporter for the Committee that drafted Virginia's ethics rules and as a member of Virginia's Standing Committee on Legal Ethics and Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee.
Mr. Spahn has spoken at over 1,000 CLE programs throughout the United States, and in several foreign countries. He has written a two volume book on the attorney client privilege and the work product doctrine, a 300 page book on Virginia defamation law, two other book chapters and over 70 articles in Virginia and national publications on ethics and other topics. The ABA's General Practice Section honored Mr. Spahn's article on "Litigation Ethics in the Modern Age" as one of the "Best Articles Published by the ABA" in 2004. After personally reading, summarizing, and categorizing over 1,600 Virginia Bar legal ethics opinions, he made his work available to the public online through his bio page on the McGuireWoods website.
Over the past decade, Mr. Spahn has been frequently selected as one of the "Best Lawyers in America," as a Virginia "Super Lawyer" and as one of Virginia's "Legal Elite." He is a Fellow of both the Virginia Law Foundation, and the American Bar Foundation (whose membership is limited to one third of one percent of America's lawyers). Mr. Spahn graduated magna cum laude from Yale University and received his J.D. from Yale Law School.