Privilege and in-house counsel: Tips to avoid waiver of privilege part 2

Key Points:

There are some simple steps in-house counsel can take to ensure privilege isn't waived.

In the last edition of Insights, we gave some tips to help ensure privilege applies to in-house counsel's work product. In this follow-up article, we discuss the principles governing waiver of privilege, and steps organisations should take to avoid waiver.

Once privilege attaches to a communication, it is critical to ensure that privilege isn't waived by a failure to keep the communication confidential. Inadvertent waiver of privilege can happen all too easily if an organisation doesn't have the right policies in place to keep legal communications confidential, or if its employees are unaware of the risks of waiving privilege and how to avoid them.