On March 25th, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice issued a decision in which it held that that communications sent and received in order to build a public relations strategy ancillary to ongoing litigation were not subject to litigation privilege. Master McLeod stated:
I am not however persuaded that strategy associated with public relations, media relations or lobbying ancillary to litigation would or should be protected. The notion of the adversarial advocate and the zone of privacy cannot be stretched so far as to protect the strategy of the party in the court of public opinion.
This is the most principled finding in a decision that also canvasses and provides helpful comment on a number of issues related to the production of e-mails. Master McLeod remarks, for example, that a search for documents containing keywords is a means of discovering relevant and privileged documents but does not “render the document automatically relevant” or “answer the question of privilege.”
Coincidentally, Craig Ball recently posted on the same issue in, “Are Documents Containing Agreed-Upon Keywords Responsive Per Se?” Ball urges counsel to address the responding party’s access to responsive documents expressly in the discovery planning process. He also raises the motivation a party may have to demand a full set of responsive documents:
We may be gravitating to a place where counsel’s countermanding a machine’s “objective” characterization of a document as responsive will be viewed with suspicion. Responding parties see electronic culling as just an extension of counsel’s judgment; but, requesting parties often see electronic culling as an objective arbiter of responsiveness. Face it: requesting parties believe that opponents hide documents.
If you follow e-discovery developments, both this case and the Ball post are worth a good read.
Kaymar Rehabilitation v Champlain CCAC, 2013 ONSC 1754 (CanLII).
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