They can basically say "i can't speak to you". More than even that is tricky.

As for the latter, that's why i said "when they know of a non waivable conflict".

Emphasis being "know of".

Here, they know they have a conflict - they have a client, it's not this person, and they know their client will be adversarial to this person. They aren't even part of a law firm that represents multiple clients regularly or something like that where sometimes the conflicts might be waivable (often not, but still)

This is a very very easy case.

If they don't know they have a conflict, sure, they can have a conversation for the purposes of understanding if they have a conflict.

That's not this case though!

> Surely they could refer the enquiry to the bar association or something in this jurisdiction.

They might but in many cases wouldn't even do that because they still wouldn't get paid for it. Doesn't matter, you don't need them for that.

To be fair, in many cases, they can be held responsible for whether you refer people to the right place.