Sometimes a single solution solves two very different problems.

One of the biggest problems in protecting your attorney-client privilege is that it is often hard to speak in private. All telephone calls from the jail are recorded, the sheriff looks through your client’s mail, and the interview rooms at the jail are likely under electronic surveillance as well. A few years ago there was a contentious case in which the District Attorney was attempting to introduce recorded statements that were privileged, and even though the statements were not used, law enforcement was still able to eavesdrop on private and privileged communications.

In working on a criminal case where much of the search warrant was based upon information gathered from a trash run, David began to wonder: if the Supreme Court has held that the police can look through your trash because there is no expectation of privacy in your discarded refuse (see California v. Greenwood, 486 U.S. 35 (1998) (Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the warrantless search and seizure of garbage left for collection outside the cartilage of a home), what would prevent particularly ambitious law enforcement agents from looking through our Firm’s trash? The items in Greenwood’s trash can were contraband. The information in our recycling bin were discarded drafts. Would a discarded draft of a letter lose its protection as work-product privilege merely because it is discarded? We didn’t want to wait to find out.

 After investing in secured trash bins that are kept under lock and key, we contracted with a shredding service that specialized in the destruction of high security documents – and pays for the additional cost of recycling them.  Soon after, we realized how many reams of paper we were using every week and began looking for ways to reduce our cost for shredding hundreds of pounds of paper.

We made another investment in a high speed scanner and upgraded our billing software to allow for electronic billing. Our court reminder letters were replaced with e-mails, and we began scanning documents into .pdf files to e-mail to clients instead of bulky packets of paper.  We purchased dual screen monitors for all the office desktops so that documents could more easily be read instead of printed. We implemented 128-bit encryption into our e-mail service and implemented the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) software to ensure that the information that is sent to our clients cannot be hacked by third parties.

These changes were costly investments at the time, but we are seeing the benefits in costs savings from dramatically reduce our paper consumption, efficiency in storing and retrieving information, and security in knowing that our work-product stays confidential.