Month: January 2023

CASE PREVIEW


By Stephen Gillers

on Jan 5, 2023
at 9:55 am

A lawyer’s legal advice is privileged. A court cannot order the lawyer or the client to disclose it. But a lawyer’s nonlegal advice is not privileged. What happens when advice is partly legal and partly nonlegal and the two parts cannot be untangled? In such dual-purpose situations, does the privilege protect all the advice or none of it?

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear opposing answers to that question in a case known as In re Grand Jury. A law firm will argue that the privilege should protect all client communications “where obtaining or providing legal advice was one of the significant purposes behind the communication,” even if nonlegal advice predominated. The United States will argue that unless legal advice was the client’s “primary” purpose, none of the dual-purpose communications should be privileged.

The difference between

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Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP is pleased to announce that Judge Thomas B. Griffithspecial counsel to the firm and former judge on the DC Circuit, has been elected to the American Law Institute (ALI), an independent organization that works to clarify, modernize and otherwise improve US law.

Griffith is among 31 lawyers, legal scholars and judges elected to ALI in December 2022 based on professional achievement and demonstrated interest in improving the law. He joins 13 other Hunton Andrews Kurth colleagues who are ALI members.

A retired judge of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Griffith has been active in efforts to preserve the rule of law in the United States and other nations. He was a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States and frequently speaks and writes about the importance of preserving civics education and defending the

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By Michael McArthur

The final talk of the International Law Libraries Annual Course was another sobering perspective on the U.S. administration, most notably the absence of judicial review under the guise of national security. Stanford’s Professor Shirin Sinnar gave the presentation, titled “National Security and Accountability in the Courts.”

She began with the story of Professor Xiaoxing Xi, whose home was raided by the FBI in 2015 on account of an accusation that he was sharing private scientific technology with China. The news made the headlines and his life was turned upside-down, only to have the charges dropped a few months later. In an attempt to clear his name, he sued the FBI agents and the FBI for malicious prosecution based on his Chinese background. His claim was dismissed, unable to get past the threshold of Bivens action that protects federal agents for constitutional violations. The court went on to

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On a Monday in late November, I had breakfast with Nick Wurst, a conductor on the CSX railroad, at a diner in his home town of Worcester, Massachusetts. We met before dawn, and Wurst, a bearded twenty-six-year-old, was wearing a reflective Carhartt shirt and a knit hat for his 7:30 AM shift at the freight terminal in Framingham, about thirty miles away. his union, SMART-TD, which represented railway conductors and engineers, had just voted down a proposed contract meant to resolve a three-year-long standoff over wages, scheduling, and benefits. The agreement had been drafted not in the usual course of collective bargaining between the twelve rail unions and the National Carriers’ Conference Committee but by fiat, at the best of President Biden. The Administration had impanneled an emergency board, which whipped up a contract in less than a month to prevent a strike.

Each union had a chance to

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By Allison C. Reeve Davis, Senior Library Manager, Littler Mendelson, P.C. and Caren Luckie, Research Attorney, Jackson Walker LLP

Allison and Caren were both awardees of the PLLIP-SIS grant to attend the course and in this post share their experiences and “a-ha” moments.

On May 16-17, 2022, several legal information professionals gathered in Chicago for an immersive course on Competitive Intelligence (CI) in law firms. The small group of 11 comprised individuals from law firms of various size and included librarians and CI researchers alike. Facilitators Ben Brighoff (Foley & Lardner, L.L.P.) and Lynne Kilgore (Baker Botts, L.L.P.), along with additional speaker Nathalie Noel (Jenner & Block), led the group through several CI strategies, team development, stakeholder buy-in, working collaboratively with other departments, and other considerations. Attendees took away ideas and made connections with each other creating a larger network of colleagues working in this space. We have already seen

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