On July 4th the Court of Appeal of Alberta held that a chambers judge erred by accepting a claim that all documents created or collected in the course of an internal investigation were privilege without conducting a record-by-record analysis.
Legal counsel for the company initiated the investigation after a workplace fatality and directed the investigation team to segregate the investigation documents and to endorse all material as privileged and confidential. Legal counsel later swore that the dominant purpose of the investigation was the contemplation of litigation, which the chambers judge said, “invariably and logically leads to the collateral finding that, within the context of Suncor’s internal investigation that was carried out in anticipation of litigation, the information and documents created and/or collected during the internal investigation with the dominant purpose that they would assist in the contemplated litigation, are integrally covered by litigation privilege.”
The Court of Appeal held that the chambers judge erred by not conducting an analysis about the reason for the creation of each record (or bundle of records). It explained that statements may have been taken, for example, under a standing workplace protocol or that surveillance video or business records may have been collected – and that neither kind of record would be the subject of a proper privilege claim.
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