On Monday, the Supreme Court dismissed the writ of certiorari as improvidently granted in In re Grand Jury, a case that had potentially significant consequences for federal common law attorney-client privilege. Oral argument in the case was heard on January 9, 2023. The case hinged on which test should be used to determine whether
A Special Master has ordered Google to turn over supposedly “privileged” documents at issue in an NLRB dispute with former employees. Whether it is upheld in this high-profile litigation or not, the ruling points out some significant misconceptions about privilege (and work product) held by many clients and some attorneys.
Anti-union campaign advice does not
Regulatory compliance, cyber-security issues, herding legal operations staff — in-house legal practice is more complex than ever. One element that remains a continuing challenge is protecting the organization’s attorney-client privilege. Slipping up can risk the loss of the privilege in litigation involving the company, and can potentially result in an order to produce otherwise confidential communications to the other side. What are some signs that your law department needs to tune up its privilege IQ?
We posted here about the in-house firm counsel privilege, and the New York case that held late last year that the privilege didn’t apply where a malpractice plaintiff was seeking to discover all relevant communications of his former lawyers.
The opinion in Stock v. Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis LLP is in the New York
Corporate organization
charts increasingly include slots for departments with names like “risk management,” “claims handling,” and the like. When lawyers head or staff such departments, does the attorney-client privilege cover their communications with company management? Not necessarily, says a new opinion from the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Casey v. Unitek Global Services, Inc.
Sex discrimination
Both in-house and outside counsel can learn valuable lessons from In re General Motors, a recently-issued federal opinion on the attorney-client privilege and work-product doctrine. While some recent decisions have chipped away at the protections for attorney notes and internal memos, this opinion reaffirms that documents a lawyer creates during a corporate investigation will
Employee communications made in confidence during a company’s internal investigation can be protected by the attorney-client privilege even where in-house counsel leads the investigation, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has said in a recent ruling.
While the result in In Re: Kellogg Brown & Root, Inc. is not surprising, the case is noteworthy both