The ruling clarifies that a litigant can withhold disclosure of communications even if the other person was unaware that the communication was for a privileged purpose.

By Daniel Smith and Mair Williams

In recent years, the English court has examined litigation privilege carefully. However, no aspect has been the subject of more scrutiny than the requirement that documents that a litigant seeks to withhold must have been prepared for the “dominant purpose” of preparing for litigation.

In Ahuja Investments Limited v. Victorygame Limited and Surjit Singh Pandher,[1] the court considered a situation in which one party to an exchange of correspondence withheld from the other their underlying dominant purpose, which was to prepare for litigation with a third party. The court permitted the assertion of litigation privilege, distinguishing previous authority that deception destroyed a claim to privilege. However, the decision raises some difficult questions about precisely whose intention matters if the document in question is correspondence involving multiple authors.