Maryland Daily Record, June 3, 2008:

In an opinion lawyers and observers have labeled “a cautionary tale” and a “wake-up call” to members of the bar, a federal judge in Baltimore has ruled a California company waived attorney-client privilege and other protections by inadvertently turning over 165 electronic documents to opposing counsel in a Maryland lawsuit.

...

Early in the discovery process, Creative Pipe requested a “clawback agreement,” in which parties agree that waiver does not follow from inadvertent disclosures. However, they abandoned that request after Garbis extended the deadline to turn over documents by an extra four months.

After the disclosure, the defendants tried to establish the safeguards they had put in place to avoid turning over privileged and protected material.

However, they were “regrettably vague in their description of the seventy keywords used for the text-searchable ESI privilege review, how those keywords were developed, how the search was conducted, and what quality controls were employed to assess their reliability and accuracy,” Grimm wrote.