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Privilege
How Do Courts Assess the "Need to Know" Standard?
Most if not all courts recite the tenet that corporations can lose their privilege protection for privileged documents circulated within the corporation to employees beyond those with a "need to know."
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Correctly Applying Work Product Protection Continues to Elude Some Courts
As Privilege Points have periodically mentioned, some courts inexplicably limit work product protection to documents lawyers prepare or order to be prepared. This type of mistake is not the only one that some courts make.
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The Stealthy Rule 612 Risk to Privilege Protection
Lawyers preparing their clients and others for deposition or trial testimony frequently show them documents. Courts disagree about whether such lawyers can withhold from the adversary those documents' identity.
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Contention Interrogatories: Not If, But When
It should come as no surprise that litigants normally seek discovery about their adversaries' legal contentions and factual support. On the other hand, litigants' lawyers understandably consider their trial strategy and their selection of factual support to be protected work product until they have made final decisions about both. How does the law reconcile these two competing interests?
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S.D.N.Y. Issues Frightening Waiver Decision in Employment Case
Wise employment lawyers know that they should never be the decision makers when a client terminates an employee. Instead, those lawyers should be one of many inputs into the business person's decision to terminate.
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Court Addresses Privilege and Work Product Implications of Due Diligence in Corporate Acquisition – and Probably Gets It Wrong
An acquiring corporation normally conducts due diligence before acquiring an acquisition target. Not surprisingly, the acquiring corporation might seek privileged or work product protected documents or communications during such due diligence. At this due diligence stage, the acquiring company and the target are adversaries – so how do they avoid waiving those protections?
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Several Courts Deal With First-Party Insurance Work Product Issues
In first-party insurance scenarios, an insured seeks coverage directly from its insurance company for its losses (in contrast to third-party insurance, in which an insured seeks its insurance company’s help defending and paying for claims against the insured). Both types of insurance scenarios frequently involve work product protection issues.
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