United States v. Martin Schwimmer

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that common-interest doctrine protected communications from one party to an accountant hired by a co-party’s attorney where the communications were for “the ultimate purpose of assisting attorneys who had agreed upon and undertaken a joint strategy of representation.”
• concluding that the defendant carried his burden of showing that he furnished information to an accountant hired by the attorney of the co-defendant, with whom the defendant shared a joint interest, and that the information he provided was thus protected by the attorney-client privilege
• explaining that the privilege “recognizes that a lawyer’s assistance can only be safely and readily availed of when free from the consequences or the apprehension of disclosure” (internal quotation marks omitted)
• finding valid joint defense privilege where information was “imparted in confidence” between parties “who had agreed upon and undertaken a joint strategy”
• common interest rule requires communication to be given in confidence and that the client reasonably understood it to be so given
• “[t]he burden of establishing the attorney-client privilege, in all its elements, always rests upon the person asserting it”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).