Opinion ID: 4442257
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Waiver by Disclosure

Text: Plaintiffs‐appellees first invoke the doctrine that a litigant waives the work product protection by voluntarily disclosing privileged material to its adversary. Steinhardt Partners, 9 F.3d 230; see also SEC v. Gupta, 281 F.R.D. 169, 171 (S.D.N.Y 2012) (“Work product protection . . . may be waived if the work product is voluntarily disclosed.”); In re Terrorist Attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, No. 03‐MDL‐ 1570, 2013 WL 2641383, at  (S.D.N.Y. June 12, 2013) (work product protection is waived upon disclosure to an adversary or disclosure to a non‐adversary that “materially increases the likelihood that an adversary can gain access to that information”); Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. v. Allegheny Energy, Inc., 229 F.R.D. 441, 445 (S.D.N.Y. 2004) (“Generally speaking, the work product privilege should not be deemed waived unless disclosure is inconsistent with maintaining secrecy from possible adversaries.”) (internal quotation marks and alterations omitted); In re Sealed Case, 676 F.2d 793, 817 (D.C. Cir. 1982) (“[A] party waives its work product protection in civil litigation if it discloses the privileged material to anyone without common interests in developing legal theories and analyses of documents.”) (internal quotation marks omitted). 28 In the FOIA Exemption 5 context (where adversaries often do not exist), this doctrine provides that public disclosure of specific details from an otherwise privileged agency memorandum waives the work product protection with respect to those facts. The D.C. Circuit, for example, has previously evaluated in an Exemption 5 case whether selective quotation of privileged documents in a non‐privileged document waived the work product protection with respect to the privileged document. Rockwell Int’l Corp. v. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, 235 F.3d 598, 605 (D.C. Cir. 2001). Here, of course, we must evaluate the impact of verbal statements describing the content of privileged memoranda, rather than actual disclosure of the memoranda themselves. But we see no reason not to apply the same inquiry. We have previously looked to “common sense” to “define the limits of the work product doctrine,” Steinhardt Partners, 9 F.3d at 235 (2d Cir. 1993), and common sense suggests that verbal description of the contents of a document, if sufficiently specific, is as “inconsistent with the maintenance of secrecy,” Rockwell, 235 F.3d at 605 (quoting United States v. Am. Tel. & Tel. Co., 642 F.2d 1285, 1299 (D.C. Cir. 1980)), of that document as would be disclosure of the document itself. 29