Serious Fraud Office v Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation: Difference between revisions

The pithy paragraph — not ''that'' pithy, since whoever held the pen is no prose stylist — was number 126:

... large corporations need, as much as small corporations and individuals, to seek and obtain legal advice without fear of intrusion.  If [[legal advice privilege]] is confined to communications passing between the lawyer and the “client” (in the sense of the instructing individual or those employees of a company authorised to seek and receive legal advice on its behalf), this presents no problem for individuals and many small businesses, since the information about the case will normally be obtained by the lawyer from the individual or board members of the small corporation.  That was the position in most of the 19^th century cases.  In the modern world, however, we have to cater for legal advice sought by large national corporations and indeed multinational ones.  In such cases, the information upon which legal advice is sought is unlikely to be in the hands of the main board or those it appoints to seek and receive legal advice.  If a multinational corporation cannot ask its lawyers to obtain the information it needs to advise that corporation from the corporation’s employees with relevant first-hand knowledge under the protection of [[legal advice privilege]], that corporation will be in a less advantageous position than a smaller entity seeking such advice. In our view, at least, whatever the rule is, it should be equally applicable to all clients, whatever their size or reach. Moreover, it is not always an answer to say that the relevant subsidiary can seek the necessary legal advice and, therefore, ask its own lawyers to secure the necessary information with the protection of legal advice privilege.  In a case such as the present, there may be issues between group companies that make it desirable for the parent company to be able to procure the information necessary to obtain its own legal advice.