When lawyers are arguing over whether documents were properly withheld from production on the basis of attorney-client privilege, one side or the other will often say "let’s have the Judge do an in camera review."  (Translation for nonlawyers reading this blog: let’s drop all these documents on the Judge and let him or her decide).

Judges love this procedure, right? That would not be so.

A very short opinion the other day from the Business Court in Crockett Capital Corp. v. Inland American Winston Hotels is a good illustration. The decision suggests it is a good idea for both sides to take steps to make such a review as easy as possible for the Judge. There’s also a good point on the scope of attorney-client privilege.

The Documents For The In Camera Review Were Highly Repetitive

The parties were arguing over redactions made to a number of emails on claimed grounds of privilege. In the ensuing in camera review. The parties provided what the Court described as "two large three-ring binders," one of which had clean copies of the claimed-to-be-privileged emails and the other of which had redacted copies of the emails produced.

We all know that emails proliferate like bunnies. The problem for the Court was that the emails in the binders had done exactly that. They were repeated over and over, in what the Court described as "repetitive strings of the same email time and time again." 

There’s a process in e-discovery called "deduplication," which eliminates redundant copies of electronic documents. The lack of deduplication did not make the Court happy. Here’s a quote:

Seldom has the Court been called upon to waste so much of its time because counsel did not fulfill their responsibilities in the meet and confer required by the Court’s Local Rule 18.6. . . . It is apparent that counsel did not sit down and look at the documents. If so, they surely would have realized that the Court was being asked to look at repetitive strings of the same email time and time again. . . . If counsel had met and conferred they would have provided the Court with one copy of each email string rather than the copy for each recipient and saved the Court hours of wasted time. Eighty percent of the  documents would not have required Court review if counsel had done their job.

That the documents were in electronic format was not an excuse. The Court said:

Discovery in a digital age is expensive and difficult. That does not relieve counsel  of their obligation to carefully review documents and to sit down with the documents before them in a meet and confer and reduce to the fullest extent work required by the Court. Such scrutiny obviously did not occur in this case.

Privilege Issues

The Court also questioned some of the claims of privilege, which involved documents exchanged between businesspeople but copied to lawyers. The Court described these as "emails on which lawyers were simply copied with information about business decisions and no advice was sought or given."

It said: "[b]usiness decisions are not protected just because a lawyer is copied on a memo. Businessmen making business decisions may not hide behind their lawyers. Lawyers making business decisions cannot hide behind a privilege."