French Defenses Against Foreign Legal Proceedings May Be Getting a Boost -
In the United States, all attorneys are entitled to the benefits of attorney-client privilege and work product doctrine whether they work for a private law firm, a corporation, or the government. But in France (and to an extent the rest of Europe, where legal privilege is generally less robust for in-house counsel than in the United States), in-house counsel has no such privilege. An in-house counsel’s correspondence with other company employees on legal matters, as well as that counsel’s memoranda and notes, are subject to discovery in foreign litigation. At the same time, U.S. courts have been largely hostile to claims by French companies (and indeed, all foreign litigants with similar claims) that producing relevant documents located in France will subject them to prosecution in France under the French “blocking statute”—a domestic law that imposes criminal penalties for producing documents in a foreign country.
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