For years, privilege was the invaluable asset taken for granted by the profession. But those days have long since passed, with regulators increasingly testing the boundaries of privilege in a series of investigations and court actions.
This trend has re-opened much of the settled law on privilege and generated several cases – most notably the court battle between the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and mining group ENRC over the disclosure of internal documents – that have made the area one of the most closely watched fields of civil law.