Costco Wholesale Corp. v. Superior Court, S163335 (Cal. Nov. 30, 2009)

In 2000, Costco hired outside counsel to provide legal advice regarding the applicability of certain wage and overtime laws to its warehouse managers.  In furtherance of providing such advice, counsel spoke with two managers Costco had made available to her.  Thereafter, she provided Costco with a 22-page opinion letter addressing the question at issue.  Several years later, plaintiffs in a class action against Costco sought to compel production of the relevant opinion letter arguing that the letter contained unprivileged information and that Costco had placed the contents in issue thereby waiving the privilege.

To resolve the question, the court ordered the letter be reviewed by a discovery referee who subsequently recommended production of the letter with heavy redactions.  The referee reasoned that the factual information therein was not privileged and that while interviewing the two managers, the attorney had acted not as an attorney but as a fact finder.  The trial court adopted the recommendation and ordered the letter produced.  On appeal (and without ruling on the merits of the trial court’s order or its decision to refer the letter to a discovery referee for review), the court affirmed the order reasoning that Costco had failed to establish that the production would cause irreparable harm.  The issue was appealed to the Supreme Court of California.

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Calixto v. Watson Bowman Acme Corp., 2009 WL 3823390 (S.D. Fla. Nov. 16, 2009)

In this breach of contract litigation, plaintiff filed a motion to compel defendant Watson Bowman Acme Corporation (“WABO”) to “remedy its spoliation of documents” by restoring and searching back-up tapes that potentially contained copies of emails that were deleted.  Plaintiff also sought sanctions for the alleged spoliation.  The court denied plaintiff’s motion to compel the restoration of all back-up tapes, following its determination that the burden and cost of such restoration rendered the documents not reasonably accessible and upon finding that plaintiff failed to establish good cause for such a search.  However, as to a one tape determined to potentially contain the relevant deleted emails, the court granted plaintiff’s motion and ordered the tape be restored and searched.  Regarding sanctions, the court denied plaintiff’s motion absent a clear indication of a duty to preserve at the time of the deletion and absent any evidence of bad faith.

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Alamar Ranch, LLC v. City of Boise, 2009 WL 3669741 (D. Idaho Nov. 2, 2009)

In this case arising from a land use and permitting dispute, the court ruled that emails sent by a non-party to her attorney using her work computer and work-assigned email address were not protected by the attorney-client privilege.  In so holding, the court relied in large part upon the existence of company policy which put the employee on notice that her emails were subject to monitoring and were not confidential.  Emails sent by the attorney to the employee’s work account were likewise unprotected where the attorney was on notice of the employee’s use of company email and should have recognized the risk that such emails were unprotected.  As for emails sent to the attorney by other clients and copied to the employee, the court reasoned that such emails retained their privileged status where the senders (non-employees of the relevant company) were not on notice of the potential exposure of their emails to outside scrutiny.

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