Why should one lawyer usually not prepare an agreement for both a buyer and a seller?

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illustration from Charles Dickens's Bleak House — Legal ethics Illustration by Hablot Knight Browne for Charles Dickens's *Bleak House*. Here Lady Dedlock is visited by her cunning old lawyer, who discovers her deepest secret and threatens to reveal it to her husband.

A lawyer should generally not prepare an agreement for both a buyer and a seller because it creates a conflict of interest.

In legal practice, an attorney is prohibited from representing clients with conflicting interests because they cannot simultaneously advocate for one party while advancing the opposing interests of another. When drafting an instrument that defines the respective rights of a buyer and a seller, the lawyer’s duty to provide full and faithful representation to one client may be compromised by their obligations to the other.1

Ethical standards require that a lawyer must not be both for and against a client. While these prohibitions are not always absolute—as clients may sometimes provide consent after full disclosure—the risk of undermining the integrity of the legal process remains. If the public interest is deemed to be adversely affected, even client consent may not be sufficient to permit such dual representation.1