Walking the Legal Privilege Tightrope - Managing the Risk of Breaking Privilege

Todd Presnell employs his significant experience in studying, analyzing, and applying evidentiary privileges for clients and as a court-appointed Special Master to decide privilege-related disputes. He counsels and advises in-house legal departments on establishing and protecting the corporate attorney-client privilege, consults with trial teams on discovery issues and motion practice regarding privilege-related objections, and leads and advises internal investigations.

Todd is the lead author of the new legal treatise Privileges and Protections: Tennessee and Sixth Circuit Law (Matthew Bender & Co. 2024), a 700 page examination of each evidentiary privilege recognized under Tennessee law and federal law with a focus on Sixth Circuit decisions. The treatise explores all privilege topics, ranging from the attorney-client privilege to the political-vote privilege to the peer-review privilege to the clergy-communicant privilege. A former Tennessee Supreme Court justice noted that, “With the publication of Privileges and Protections: Tennessee and Sixth Circuit Law, the bench and bar now have a single, authoritative point of entry into the workings of evidentiary privileges.”

Tracey Garland Vinson currently serves as Senior Assistant General Counsel and Director of eDiscovery in the Global Litigation Group of Bayer US LLC, where she leads a robust eDiscovery practice in cooperation with Bayer’s IT Legal Services group. She works with internal and external stakeholders to efficiently preserve, identify, collect, process and review data needed for litigation, investigation, subpoena response, and compliance. She also assesses and recommends new technologies to increase the efficiency of this process. She proactively identifies and advises on eDiscovery-related legal issues that could adversely affect risk. Prior to joining Bayer, she was litigation counsel with CNA Insurance Companies and a shareholder at the firm of Picadio McCall Miller & Norton in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

As Associate General Counsel, Michele Slachetka serves as a lawyer for Jenner & Block, counseling firm management and lawyers on ethics compliance, risk management, claims litigation, and other issues. She regularly advises the firm on conflicts of interest resolution, firm policies and procedures, client and firm contracts, and engagement intake issues.

As a litigator, Michele previously served Fortune 500 clients in the aviation, transportation, telecommunications, financial, and defense industries, working on a variety of bet-the-company matters as well as government and internal investigations. In that role, she assisted clients in developing strategies for responding to government requests and inquiries and litigation, frequently working on large-scale, sensitive litigation and investigations where organization and attention to detail are critical.

In her civil practice, Michele acted as a day-to-day advisor to clients on the nuts and bolts of litigation and a strategic advisor on substantive issues. She worked on teams that represented companies in connection with US Department of Justice high-profile corruption investigations, False Claims Act investigations and litigation, and chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. Michele also is the co-author of a two-volume, ten-chapter treatise on various legal privileges, including the attorney-client privilege and the work product doctrine. She maintains a robust pro bono practice.

Paul Hodkinson is the Editor-In-Chief of Law.com International. Before joining the company in late 2018, he was the Deputy Editor and Comment Editor of Financial News, part of Dow Jones. He has also held roles as Acting Editor of Financial News and Editor of Private Equity News and has written for The Wall Street Journal as well as numerous private equity publications in the U.S. It is his second stint at Legal Week, after he worked at the publication between 2002 and 2008.

Jeremy is a Partner in the Data and Discovery Strategies practice group at Shook, Hardy & Bacon. For more than a decade, his practice has focused on discovery and information governance. Jeremy advises clients on best practices for preservation, collection, processing, review, and production as part of the discovery process. Jeremy is actively involved in the eDiscovery legal community and dedicates a portion of his time to tracking relevant market and technology trends to better serve his clients. He is the author of the Electronic Discovery Institute publication Discovery Cases that Count, which covers over 950 of the most impactful discovery cases from the past three decades. Jeremy is also the author of the Practical Law resource Document Retention Policy: US Checklist; a co-author of the eDiscovery chapter in Product Liability Litigation: Current Law, Strategies and Best Practices by PLI Press; and a contributing author of Spoliation, an EDI guidebook.