Evidence
Seeing Other Side’s Docs Knocks Miami Law Firm Off of $100M Case
Posted Sep 23, 2008, 09:42 am CST
By Martha Neil
A Miami law firm can't continue to represent its client in a complex $100 million dispute because of a third party's inadvertent production of privileged documents.
Because a shareholder at the Kenny Nachwalter law firm saw the privileged material and others may have done so, too, the entire firm is disqualified from continuing to represent its client in the convoluted case, according to a 3rd District Court of Appeal in Florida ruling last week.
The underlying litigation involves state-court tort claims concerning the adverse effect that a 2001 airline merger agreement between Southern Air and Aerofloral allegedly had on a prior agreement by Atlas Air to lease two Boeing 747s to Aerofloral. There is also a related federal bankruptcy case, explains the Daily Business Review.
The Nachwalter firm's client is the Greenberg Traurig law firm, which was named as a defendant because it represented the airlines involved in the merger.
Privileged documents were inadvertently produced to the Nachwalter firm when a third-party document management company delivered them to the wrong recipient, the article explains.
A Miami-Dade circuit court judge disqualified only Lauren Ravkind, the Nachwalter shareholder to whom the privileged material was actually delivered, but both sides then appealed: The law firm contended Ravkind shouldn't have been disqualified over an opponent's error in producing privileged material, and Atlas argued that the disqualification should apply not just to Ravkind but to the entire law firm.
"This is not a case where a party fails to adequately review its own records before producing them," writes Atlas attorney Phillip Allen III of Garbett Stiphany in a petition to the appeals court. "The parties' mutually engaged document-management professional inadvertently commingled documents in its possession and then misdelivered the documents."
The appeals court apparently agreed.
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