SAN FRANCISCO — The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sounded ready Thursday to order a San Francisco law firm to hand over a client’s tax records, despite the firm’s protest that doing so would violate attorney-client privilege.

“By us producing the documents to the government, we are in effect incriminating our client,” Sideman & Bancroft partner Jay Weill pleaded to the court in U.S. v. Sideman & Bancroft.