Opinion ID: 167649
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Unfairness to the Parties

Text: 80 Qwest argues that adopting selective waiver would avoid unfairness to Qwest while visiting no unfairness on the Plaintiffs. If companies do not have the assurance of protection, Qwest theorizes, they simply will not release privileged documents to federal authorities. Thus, civil plaintiffs will not have access to them anyway. See Columbia/HCA Healthcare, 293 F.3d at 312 (Boggs, J., dissenting) ([T]he choice presented in this case is not one whether or not to release privileged information to private parties that has already been disclosed to the government, but rather one to create incentives that permit voluntary disclosures to the government at all.); Westinghouse, 951 F.2d at 1426 n. 13 ([I]n our view, when a client discloses privileged information to a government agency, the private litigant in subsequent proceedings is no worse off than it would have been had the disclosure to the agency not occurred.). Allowing Qwest to choose who among its opponents would be privy to the Waiver Documents is far from a universally accepted perspective of fairness. See Permian Corp., 665 F.2d at 1221; John Doe Corp., 675 F.2d at 489. 81 As discussed above, the record is silent on whether selective waiver truly is necessary to achieve cooperation. Qwest's fairness argument nevertheless rests on that very foundation. It is difficult to understand how a rejection of selective waiver will work an unfairness on Qwest when Qwest disclosed the Waiver Documents in the face of the known threat from Plaintiffs, the absence of Tenth Circuit precedent, and a dearth of favorable circuit authority. It hedged its bets by choosing to release 220,000 pages of documents but to retain another 390,000 pages of privileged documents. Qwest perceived an obvious benefit from its disclosures but did so while weighing the risk of waiver. 82 In sum, the record does not support application of selective waiver as a matter of fairness.