Waiver of Privilege

As anyone faced with discovery requests knows, one of the most important parts of producing documents is determining what documents are subject to attorney-client privilege or work product doctrine and must therefore be redacted or withheld. Failing to conduct an effective privilege review can have dire consequences -- from exposure of highly confidential information to even waiver of the privilege. In Part One of this blog post, we discussed how difficult it can be in a corporate context to determine whether an individual document should be withheld or redacted as privileged.  In this Part Two, we discuss how employing technology in our privilege review reduces risk and makes this process easier and more efficient.

Waiver of privilege and particularly inadvertent waiver of privilege is always a concern in e-discovery when producing documents to an outside party. Not only may your current litigation be affected but waiver may also affect your client’s future litigations and other litigation teams that had no involvement with your production. This is a particularly serious concern when producing documents to the government, given the power dynamics involved.