Commercial Litigation Update - August 2026

Welcome to Litigation Notes, our litigation know-how update where you will find the latest developments on commercial litigation topics from HSF Kramer’s Australian practice. 

This is a monthly wrap-up of recent cases, developments, reports and other items of interest.

Email Chain Privilege Clarified by NSWSC

The New South Wales Supreme Court has clarified that each individual email in an email chain must be assessed for privilege.

The Court’s decision arose from an application to maintain privilege over certain documents. The Court set out several principles related to privilege and email chains:

• An email package is not a single indivisible unit. Each component in an email thread must independently satisfy the dominant purpose test. It is an error to claim, or to refuse, privilege over the whole thread as a block.