Reply to Any lawyers on? When you’re emailing or messaging with other lawyers, do you ever discuss potentially sensitive issues?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am really, really careful about this due to how many times I have, as a litigator, found smoking guns in emails. Privilege isn't always relevant to my sensitivity on this, because it is not absolute. I've worked on several cases where documents the lawyers believed at the time would be protected by privilege ultimately weren't. [/quote]

I can only assume you mean non lawyer emails. Obviously. Different animal [/quote]

Privilege is not absolute.  And just because an attorney believed an email was privileged at the time doesn't mean a judge will agree during in camera review.

I'm an attorney, and I am careful about what I put into emails.  If I think something could be misconstrued, it's a phone call.[/quote]

In-house lawyers cannot effectively support a business with this kind of extremely inefficient risk-averse posture. Far-fetched scenarios about potential litigation should not drive everything. Write an email to your colleagues like a normal person.[/quote]

Depends on your experience, I guess. I was in house for ~15 years. And yes, email was often easier, especially when dealing with significant differences in time zones or co-workers in other countries for whom English was a second language. But I also saw multiple problems created that could have been avoided by a phone call instead of a hastily written and poorly phrased email. [b]And the belief that many non-lawyer coworkers had that any email marked "privileged" with in house counsel cc'd was absolutely protected from discovery created multiple headaches.[/b]

It may depend on how frequently your company is involved in litigation.  For us, litigation was not a far-fetched possibility but a continuing occurrence, due at least in part to our size and the nature of our business (media/tech) rather than any misdoing on our part. A hasty email could be extremely expensive down the road.

I'm not saying that everything had to be a phone call.  But definitely phone calls and meetings to discuss things, followed by a professional email summarizing the discussion, were best for sensitive discussions that could be misconstrued if taken out of context. And of course, it's a judgement call as to what is sensitive enough to require the extra effort to be handled that way. That judgement is part of the value that in house counsel brings to the table.[/quote]

Again, we’re not talking about “non-lawyer colleagues.” OP is talking about one lawyer refusing to email other lawyers in the company. That kind of thing coming up in discovery is a very remote possibility.[/quote]

Not the person you’re responding to, but one of the “very sensitive” posters upchain. I agree with you that, bottom line, it sounds like this junior lawyer is being too risk averse. But also it sounds like OP is not a lawyer so maybe doesn’t get how some of us have become so paranoid. [/quote]

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