By Pamela J. Bethel Last May, we wrote in this blog that we hoped and expected the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reverse a district judge’s opinion and to permit companies to assert attorney-client privilege for internal documents created in the course of a bona fide investigation by inside counsel. If...
Tag: Attorney-client privilege
Is it Safer to Discuss Some Things with Outside Counsel? (Pt. 3)
By Carol O’Riordan and Jay Shah In our last blog post, we discussed a recent New Mexico case in which the court wrestled with the question of how to determine whether a communication was primarily made for business purposes or for legal purposes. This question was important because it was the deciding factor in showing...
Is it Safer to Discuss Some Things with Outside Counsel? (Pt. 2)
By Carol O’Riordan and Jay Shah How should courts go about deciding, in close cases, whether an internal memorandum constitutes privileged legal advice or discoverable business advice? Bhandari v. Artesia Gen. Hospital, the New Mexico case discussed in our previous post, is illustrative. It involved an employment dispute between a hospital corporation and two doctors...
Privilege Is Necessary to Ensure Successful Internal Investigations
When a company undertakes an internal investigation of suspected wrongdoing, in-house attorneys are often the ones who do the investigating. Very often, in-house lawyers thus take a central role in a company’s compliance function, and one of the first steps that they take at the direction of top management is to conduct a no-holds-barred investigation...