At the tail end of the last century, in-house legal departments were
beginning to look expendable. A few big departments, like the one at Chicago’s Continental Bank, disappeared. Their entire legal function was outsourced. A consensus soon formed that in-house attorneys needed to spend less time looking for potential problems with business deals and more time integrating themselves into business strategy. Overall that has been a success, but now a question which rarely arose in the bad old days when lawyers were “deal killers” is always on the table: Are inter-corporate communications involving attorneys privileged? In this issue of Today’s General Counsel, columnist Todd Presnell writes about staying on the safe side given that courts are applying widely different standards for attorney/client privilege, and David Michel and Stella Oyalabu discuss a case in Louisiana in which failing to label an opinion as “legal advice” blew the privilege for an entire email string.
