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Privilege
Delaware Courts Address Common Interest Doctrine Issue: Part I
The common interest doctrine occasionally allows separately represented clients to share privileged communications without waiving that fragile protection. Nearly all courts require that the common interest doctrine participants share a common legal interest, rather than merely a common financial interest. McGuireWoods partner, Thomas Spahn, offers insight in his latest privilege point.
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Another Court Finds Public Relations Consultants Outside Privilege Protection
Companies dealing with the pandemic (and finding themselves in pandemic-triggered future litigation) may seek public relations consultants’ assistance. Companies and their lawyers should remember that most courts reject privilege protection for communications with such consultants, and work product protection for documents those consultants create.
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Illinois Federal Court Addresses a Substantive and a Logistical Privilege Issue: Part II
Part one of this Privilege Point addressed an Illinois federal court’s holding that the attorney-client privilege protected a company executive’s relaying of legal advice to another executive, as well as the former’s email about his intent to discuss an intellectual property matter with the company lawyer. See where McGuireWoods partner, Thomas Spahn, picks up from where he left off.
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Illinois Federal Court Addresses a Substantive and a Logistical Privilege Issue: Part I
A frequent privilege issue arising in federal and state courts involves communications that do not come from or go to a lawyer. Such communications may clearly deserve privilege protection, under certain limited circumstances.
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Are “Litigation Holds” Protected by the Privilege or the Work Product Doctrine?
With pandemic-triggered litigation predicted to increase, corporations’ lawyers undoubtedly will address the possible duty to impose “litigation holds,” which direct corporate employees to preserve pertinent documents.
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Can Non-Practicing Lawyers Ever Deserve Privilege Protection?
Thomas Spahn, partner with McGuireWoods, returns with a new privilege point. The attorney-client privilege rests on a grand societal purpose — encouraging clients to safely share with their lawyers all the pertinent facts, so lawyers can guide them in a lawful direction. This is the same societal purpose underlying lawyers’ confidentiality duty.
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Courts Point to Several Factors in Addressing The “Primary Purpose” Privilege Standard
Nearly every court protects as privileged only those communications or documents whose “primary purpose” was for the clients to request legal advice or the lawyers to provide the requested legal advice. A few courts have taken a more liberal “one significant purpose” approach, but that favorable doctrine has not widely taken root.
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