Communications between a client and litigation counsel may be considered privileged, and therefore may not be producible in the litigation.
This privilege can be extended to communications between parties and counsel to litigation who have a “common interest”.
“Common interest privilege” has been described as arising “where one party (party A) voluntarily discloses a document which is privileged in its hands to another party (party B) who has a common interest in the subject matter of the communication or in litigation in connection with which the document was brought into being.” The result is that the document is privileged in the hands of party B.
To put it another way, in the leading case of Iggillis Holdings Inc. v. Canada (National Revenue), 2018 FCA 51 (CanLII), (leave to the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed) the Federal Court of Appeal stated:
[S]olicitor-client privilege is not waived when an opinion provided by a lawyer to one party is disclosed, on a confidential basis, to other parties with sufficient common interest in the same transactions. This principle applies whether the opinion is first disclosed to the client of the particular lawyer and then to the other parties or simultaneously to the client and the other parties. In each case, the solicitor-client privilege that applies to the communication by the lawyer to his or her client of a legal opinion is not waived when that opinion is disclosed, on a confidential basis, to other parties with sufficient common interest in the same transactions.
Common interest privilege is not a “stand-alone privilege”: it extends an existing privilege to the receiving party. The communication must be otherwise privileged for common interest privilege to apply. For example, a document that is subject to privilege in the hands of party A may also remain privileged in the hand of party B, if there is a common interest at the time the document is disclosed.
The onus of establishing that a document is privileged from production rests on the party asserting the privilege. That party must provide evidence that supports the claim of privilege. If necessary, the court can review the documents in order to decide the validity of the claim: Rule 30.04(6) of the Rules of Civil Procedure.
The determination of whether the privilege exists depends upon objective evidence of the purpose and content of the communications and not the mere belief of the parties.
The concept is discussed at length in the matter of Ross v. Bragg, 2020 BCSC 337 (CanLII). There, the plaintiff made a claim against a number of defendants for damages relating to a lost business opportunity.
Correspondence between one of the defendants and their lawyer was shared with another defendant. If these documents contained legal advice, they would remain privileged in the hands of all of the defendants. The court reviewed the documents to determine whether they contained legal advice as not all documents from a lawyer are subject to privilege.
As an example of the application of the claim of privilege, the court ordered the production of minutes of a meeting between the defendants relating to discussions of the business opportunity, as these were not privileged, but refused to order production of the minutes relating to discussions of the defence to the litigation.
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