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General Motors Corp. v. Chauvin1/20/2005
brief reads:
Legal Staff Internal Files: Doc 131, which contains over 400 pages of data, is a compilation of the cases and litigation status taken from General Motors' legal department database. This information is accessible only to members of General Motors' Legal Staff. The database is maintained by Legal Staff department attorneys and contains their impressions, legal opinions and litigation plans for closed, pending and not-in-suit matters. Also included are evaluations reflecting the allegations and expert opinions presented in the litigation of these cases. The evaluations also contain information on the settlement of certain cases. This document was used in the litigation study, but not prepared specifically for it.
The 97 extra words in the description in GM's brief, had they been included in the Privilege Log, would have gone a long way toward helping the Court of Appeals evaluate whether the circuit court had abused its discretion in finding that the documents were not privileged.
Of course, there is no guarantee that lengthier, and more specific, descriptions would result in a finding that the documents are privileged-there simply is not a bright line rule-but the burden of proving that the privilege exists is on the party claiming the privilege. If the party claiming the privilege wants to succeed, it must include enough detail in its Privilege Log to allow a court to evaluate the privilege claim. Thus, it was GM's burden to provide enough detail in its Privilege Log to convince the lower courts that the privilege applied to the documents in question. GM's failure to carry that burden does not give it license to reargue the merits of the case before this Court or to claim error on the part of the Court of Appeals for failing to perform a review that it had no duty to perform and that GM never even asked for. Nor does GM's failure to carry that burden constitute an abuse of discretion on the part of the circuit court or the Court of Appeals. As such, we find that the Court of Appeals did not abuse its discretion in denying GM's petition for a writ.
IV. CONCLUSION
For the foregoing reasons, the judgment of the Court of Appeals is affirmed.
All concur.
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