In a year that brought just a handful of high-profile opinions from the state Supreme Court, one was especially vital to the legal profession and its client base — a ruling that attorney-client privilege attaches not only to communications from client to lawyer, but to those transmitted by an attorney to his or her client.
The February decision in Gillard v. AIG Insurance Co. , delivered by Justice Thomas G. Saylor for the majority on a 5-2 vote, made it clear that the privilege is a “two-way street.” A raft of amici, including the Association of Corporate Counsel and the Philadelphia Bar Association, clarified an area of law left in limbo from inconsistent court decisions in the state.
