UK: Legal advice privilege and what qualifies as a “foreign lawyer”

The legal profession is diverse in terms of the regulations and standards that apply to legal practitioners in each country. This raises the fundamental question, for the purposes of legal advice privilege (LAP), of what constitutes a “foreign lawyer”.

PJSC Tatneft v Bogolyubov & others [2020] EWHC 2437 (Comm) examined this question in the context of a dispute as to whether LAP applied to communications between a Russian corporate client and members of its internal legal department.

We take a closer look at the decision in a briefing note - available here.