They’ve changed the law in relation to legal professional privilege on us. The common law has been abolished, at least in relation to compulsory processes (discovery, subpoenas, interrogatories, notice to produce) in fora where the new Evidence Act, 2008 applies, and the adduction of evidence in those fora. Two legal professional privilege regimes are now going to apply in relation to any particular communication. If the Tax Man, or the Legal Services Commissioner, compels you to produce documents, the common law will apply. If you produce them, the common law will determine whether the production amounts to a waiver. If the investigation leads to court (but not VCAT) proceedings proceedings, to which the new law will apply, you might be compelled by subpoena to produce documents you successfully resisted producing in the investigation pursuant to the common law. Furthermore, in those proceedings, the Court will decide for itself, under the new law, whether the production to the Commissioner in the investigation amounted to a waiver or not.
The change is not as great as it might have been had the uniform evidence law been introduced into our land prior to the last round of amendments. Now the law relating to implied waiver of privilege is stated in more or less the same terms as the common law, as expounded by Mann v Carnell, and the new law applies to post-commencement but pre-trial stages of court cases as well as at trial. But there are differences too: Justice Byrne’s decision referred to below confirms it.
I blogged about the transitional provisions for the new legislation here. It occurred to me that since the Hikers are so fond of emphasising what a basic common law right the right to assert legal professional privilege over confidential communications is, there was a real question about whether the changes ought to operate retrospectively, in the sense that communications which occurred before this year (i.e. before the commencement of the new Act) which were already entitled to legal professional privilege at common law might be adjudged not to be privileged for the purposes of proceedings governed by the new Act. There is a presumption in statutory interpretation against the retrospective taking away of accrued rights. But there is no such presumption in relation to changing procedures for the vindication of rights.
Someone has actually already run this esoteric argument. In Main-Road Property Group Pty Ltd v Pelligra & Sons Pty Ltd (No 4) [2010] VSC 27, Justice Byrne, who knows a thing or two about the law of evidence, gave the argument short shrift, though his views are purely dicta:
’33 The first question is whether the claim for privilege should be addressed under the Evidence Act 2008 or under the pre-existing statutory or common law regime. It was at first submitted on behalf of the Artusa parties that the entitlement to legal professional privilege is a substantial rather than a procedural right and it should therefore be governed by the law as it stood in 2003 rather than by the Uniform Act which came into force on 1 January 2010. This submission was not pressed in final address and in my view, rightly so.
34 The transitional provisions contained in clause 2 of Schedule 2 of the Evidence Act 2008 make it clear that the Act applies to a hearing commencing after the commencement date, 1 January 2010. The provisions of Part 3.10, Division 1, differ from the pre-existing common law and the Evidence Act 1958. In Telstra Corporation v Australis Media Holdings,[4] McClelland CJ in Eq concluded that the provisions of the New South Wales Uniform Evidence Act 1995 were inconsistent with the previous law concerning legal professional privilege so that the previous law did not apply to the trial before the court.[5] I would respectfully adopt his Honour’s observations which are equally applicable to the Victorian Evidence Act 2008.
[4] (1997) 41 NSWLR 346 at 349.
[5] See also Evidence Act 2008 (Vic) ss 9, 56(1).’
