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Course Details

Course Information
  • smart_display Format

    Live Online with Live Q&A

  • signal_cellular_alt Difficulty Level

    Intermediate

  • work Practice Area

    Class Action and Other Litigation

Date & Time
  • event Date

    Tuesday, September 16, 2025

  • schedule Time

    1:00 p.m. ET./10:00 a.m. PT

  • timer Program Length

    90 minutes

Credit Information

  • This 90-minute webinar is eligible in most states for 1.5 CLE credits.

Early Bird Pricing!
MSRP
$297.00
$247.00
Save $50.00

Discount expires 8/6/25

This course is $0 with these passes:

CLE
ALL

This CLE webinar will seek to comprehensively address the issue of "mixed" or "dual-purpose" communications between clients and counsel. The panel will survey the states' different approaches to the issue, discuss key federal court decisions on the topic, and apply these state and federal law principles to contexts where the question of dual-purpose communication commonly arises.

Faculty

Erin C. Tison
Attorney
Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP

Ms. Tison has experience with all aspects of litigation, from filing the complaint up to serving as first chair at trial and everything in between. In addition to trial work, she has substantial experience taking and defending both fact and expert depositions, drafting and arguing complex dispositive briefing, managing the preservation, collection, analysis, and production of paper and electronic documents, conducting custodian interviews, and briefing complex and technical discovery and privilege issues.  Recently, Ms. Tison served an extended secondment with The Dow Chemical Company as a case Manager in Dow's Asbestos, Products Liability & Insurance Litigation Group. In this capacity, she managed the asbestos and premises litigation dockets for Union Carbide and Dow throughout the western and northeastern United States. This involved overseeing hundreds of ongoing product liability cases, including advising the litigation management team on case evaluation, resolution, and business strategies, as well as directing outside counsel and trial counsel teams.

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Description

Most business clients expect their lawyers to serve as business advisers as well as legal advisers. In today's competitive legal market, most lawyers are eager to oblige them. But meeting this client expectation is not without its perils. By mixing business advice or information into legal communications, lawyers or their clients may turn those communications into "dual-purpose" documents, thereby jeopardizing their privileged status.

The issue of "dual-purpose" or "mixed" documents and communications is being litigated with more frequency, and it affects litigators and transactional attorneys alike. As transactional lawyers communicate with clients outside of litigation or in pre-litigation contexts, they must understand and abide by the rules that courts will apply as they assess privilege claims over those communications in subsequent litigation. When litigating privilege claims over such communications, litigators must understand the decisive arguments that have persuaded courts to withhold or disclose dual-purpose documents in past cases.

Listen as this esteemed panel guides lawyers through how to identify dual-purpose communications, discusses state court approaches to applying the attorney-client privilege, reviews the existing methods and variations used in federal court and the current circuit split, and then offers a roadmap for litigators.

Outline

  1. State approaches
  2. Key federal court decisions
  3. Industry and context-specific application of key principles

Benefits

The panel will discuss these and other key issues:

  • How do courts analyze privilege claims over dual-purpose documents?
  • What rules do federal courts apply to dual-purpose documents in cases where federal common law controls under FRE 501?
  • What are best practices for in-house attorneys, who are enmeshed in the day-to-day business affairs of their companies, to ensure that their communications with colleagues remain privileged?
  • What are the most persuasive arguments and approaches for litigators seeking to withhold or compel disclosure of a dual-purpose document?