Tag:Privilege or Work Product Protections

Key Insight: Court found no waiver of privilege where the email at issue was inadvertently produced (as the result of plaintiff?s access to defendants? servers); where defendants took sufficiently reasonable steps to prevent disclosure as evidenced by the parties? ?repeated discussions about key word limitations? and ?broad protective order? and because ?Defendants repeatedly and specifically emphasized their concern over how Plaintiff was handling any attorney-client communications it came across?; and where defendants acted promptly to rectify the problem upon receiving notice of the inadvertent production. Accordingly, court granted defendant?s motion to strike plaintiff?s motion for sanctions which relied on the privileged email but left open plaintiff?s opportunity to re-file upon removing all reference to the privileged message

Nature of Case: Litigation arising from death of inmate while incarcerated

Electronic Data Involved: Litigation hold spreadsheet, privileged email

Key Insight: Court rejected employee of debtor?s assertions of privilege where employee failed to properly assert such privilege in his privilege log; assuming arguendo that emails were privileged, court found that employee had waived privilege in several ways: 1) employee had no reasonable expectation of privacy in communications sent or received on employer?s computer system and thus had no privilege in communications with his attorney; 2) employee provided unqualified access to emails by third parties, one of whom he asked to review his emails to identify which were privileged despite her lack of legal education; and 3) employee allowed trustee to have unqualified access to the emails by failing to object to their production to the trustee when informed that the emails would be produced

Nature of Case: Bankruptcy

Electronic Data Involved: Emails between employee and attorney sent on company computer system