Courts sometimes appoint guardians ad litem to assist minors or others. In DeSpain v. DeSpain, Consol. Case No. WD87182, 2025 Mo. App. LEXIS 398 (Mo. Ct. App. June 17, 2025), the court dealt with a lower court’s holding that the attorney-client privilege protected a guardian ad litem’s therapy session with a teenage boy and its sanctioning of the boy’s mother for giving her divorce lawyer a secret recording of the session.
The appellate court struggled to explain the role of guardians ad litem — noting a legal ethics opinion’s recognition that the role “has certain of the attributes of a traditional attorney-client relationship.” Id. at *21. The court ultimately found the privilege inapplicable, because guardians ad litem “function[] as an arm of the court” and are expected to “testify to facts that they have learned, without obtaining consent from any other person to such testimony.” Id. at *22-23.
The court reversed the sanction that was erroneously based on the mother’s violation of the attorney-client privilege but remanded the case to the lower court to analyze if other grounds justified sanctions.
