Tagged: Inadvertent

Inadvertent Production of Two Privileged Pages Among Over Two Million May Waive the Attorney-Client Privilege

The burdens associated with a massive document review of electronically-stored information (“ESI”) will not, in and of themselves, preclude a court from finding that a party has waived the attorney-client privilege with respect to an inadvertently produced document. In Jacob v. Duane Reade, Inc., Magistrate Judge Katz of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York held that a privileged, two-page email that was inadvertently produced during the review of over two million documents in less than one month did not have to be returned and that the privilege had been waived because the producing party, Duane Reade, had failed to timely request its return. Duane Reade had used an outside vendor and review team to conduct its review of this large volume of ESI. The document in question concerned a meeting among several individuals, including an in-house attorney at Duane Reade. Duane Reade argued that the email was inadvertently produced because it was neither from nor to an attorney, and only included advice received at a meeting from an in-house attorney, identified in the email only by the first name “Julie.”

Think Before You “Data Dump” or Privileges Could Be Waived

When a party voluntarily dumps data on its adversary without first conducting a meaningful privilege review, that party may be deemed to have waived any applicable privileges, particularly where it fails to timely argue that a privilege review would be too costly. That is the lesson of In re Fontainebleau Las Vegas Contract Litig., 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 4105 (S.D. Fla. Jan. 7, 2011), a cautionary tale of the dangers of data dumping. After repeatedly failing to meet court-ordered production deadlines, in response to a subpoena, Fontainebleau Resorts, LLC (“FBR”) essentially dumped on the requesting parties (the “Term Lenders”) three servers containing approximately 800 GB of data–without first conducting any meaningful privilege review. Consequently, in its January 7th decision, the court granted the Term Lenders’ motion seeking a declaration that FBR waived its privilege claims. Had FBR litigated this matter differently, it might have protected its privileged information.

The 2010 E-Discovery Landscape: Panel Discussion on the Essential E-Discovery Decisions of 2010 at Gibbons Fourth Annual E-Discovery Conference

Gibbons’ Fourth Annual E-Discovery Conference kicked off with a panel discussion on the essential e-discovery decisions from 2010. The panel, comprised of renowned e-discovery authority Michael Arkfeld of Arkfeld & Associates, Scott J. Etish, Esq., an associate at Gibbons and member of the firm’s E-Discovery Task Force, and the Hon. John J. Hughes, United States Magistrate Judge for the District of New Jersey (Retired), addressed numerous recent decisions related to the following areas: (1) the need for outside and inside counsel to monitor compliance; (2) obtaining electronically stored information from foreign companies; (3) cooperation between adverse parties; (4) social media discovery; (5) searches and inadvertently disclosed privilege documents; and (6) legal holds and sanctions. The panel provided guidance as to best practices related to numerous areas, including navigating e-discovery challenges in the aftermath of the seminal Pension Committee, Rimkus and Victor Stanley II decisions. A brief summary of all of the cases the panel discussed is available here, and a copy of the PowerPoint slides the panel used is available here.