Muskat Devine Partner Mike Muskat has been featured in a Legal Dive article on the importance of protecting client privilege in communications involving in-house counsel that have a dual legal and business purpose. The article, “Split communications to ensure privilege after SCOTUS nixes ruling,” provides advice for in-house counsel on how best to protect the privilege when drafting communications that may involve both legal and business matters.
This comes after the U.S. Supreme Court in January dismissed its review of a case in which it was set to address how to assess the privilege in mixed-purpose communications.
The article advises that a best practice for in-house counsel is to separate out communications that have both a legal and business purpose, and convey that the legal-purpose communication is for the purpose of giving legal advice.
If it’s not practical to separate communications, Mr. Muskat advised trying to bifurcate advice within the same channel – dividing communications into two by prefacing it with language that makes the difference clear – such as by saying “The following paragraph constitutes legal advice in response to your question regarding [blank],” Mr. Muskat said.
To read the entire article, click here.