New Attorney Client Privilege Opinion

This is an interesting new case from the Maryland Court of Appeals that underscores the limits of the attorney-client privilege: you can’t use it as a sword and a shield. Here, the defendant in a breach of contract action hung his hat in his defense of a bad faith allegation by citing letters with his lawyers to show he was acting in good faith.

The court held that if you crack that door; you have to open the whole thing. This is a problem for the defendant if another correspondence to his lawyers is referred to by the court as the “stop the bastards email.” You can imagine this had an unhappy ending for the defendant, which it did to the tune of $40 million.

You can read the entire opinion in CR-RSC Tower I, LLC, et al. v. RSC Tower I, LLC, here.