Recently, they had to pay out millions for pedophile cases. They lost the clergy client privileges. The only privilege they managed to maintain was lawyer/client privileges. They want to distance themselves from the congregations. How? by allowing the elders in a congregation to run things autonomously to a great extent. However, there will be one person, who will be appointed by the legaldepartment of the WTas their representative, and all correspondence from the congregation will be handled by this person and forwarded to the legal department in Brooklyn or wherever. These special hired hands will be working solely as legal assistants of the legal departments. All the correspondence will be covered by lawyer/client privilege and will not be opened to scrutinization of any court. These strong armed heavies will be called in from time to time to receive special schooling and instructions, all under the name of the Legal Department.
I can see something like that. The main problem would be that you still have too many of these reps of the legal department. The CO already performs similar functions, especially in the meeting with the elders where the CO will read letters from the WTS and review an outline provided by the WTS that gives instructions to elders on how to "handle" things. Many times,the elders were not allowed to actually see the letter or make a copy of it, but had to write down the instructions in the Flock book.
I could see a position below CO but above the BOE in the local congregations. They could assign one man to "handle" either 1 KH (usually 2-3 congregations) or perhaps have as many as 4-5 congregations in which this person would be responsible for.
The problem (as I understand it which is probably not correct) with clergy privilege is that if more than 1 clergyman knows about the confession, then privilege is deemed waived. So unless this rep would hear all confessions, then you've still got that issue. But, as is pointed out above, atty-client privilege was held because the legal department is an in-house law firm in a seperate corp. I'm just not sure that these appointed "legal assistants" giving information and advice to local BOEs would be an extension of the legal department. I would argue that they have no legal training and that they were already serving (and perhaps would continue to serve) as elders in the local congos, therefore are still reps of the WTS.
Maybe if they deleted all the elders and held elections in local congos and any reps of the legal department refused to be elders, then perhaps that would work.
I completely agree that any organizational changes that are coming are being made by the legal department and are an effort to stem the tide of lawsuits. Money makes the world go round. Also, any changes will be a crackdown, not a easing of bethel control.
