Clifford Chance
Legal advice privilege: Hong Kong and England move further apart
15 June 2017
Hong Kong has enjoyed a wider definition of "client" in the context of legal
advice privilege following last year's Court of Appeal judgment in Citic Pacific.
The judge in a recent English case, however, has put a narrow interpretation on
who can be considered to be a lawyer's client for the purposes of legal advice
privilege. If followed in Hong Kong, this would place serious constraints on the
extent to which fact gathering for the purposes of providing legal advice can be
carried out under the cloak of privilege.
