Legal professional privilege (Risk Update March 2020)

There have been several important cases in the past few months but space permits mentioning only Sports Direct International Plc v The Financial Reporting Council [2020] EWCA Civ 177, which is of particular relevance to regulatory investigations.  The Court of Appeal upheld a claim by Sports Direct to legal professional privilege in response to the Financial Reporting Council’s request for production of documents for the purposes of an investigation into the company’s auditors: the judge had erred in ordering disclosure of the privileged documents on the grounds that such disclosure would not infringe Sports Direct’s privilege in those documents. See www.legalrisk.co.uk/news.