Guarding the Attorney Client Privilege is an in-house fundamental, but it’s also tricky. As we “level up” as in-house lawyers, taking on new functions and becoming a “strategic advisor,” the lines are blurred.

In this episode, veteran white collar litigator Diana Feinstein is back in The Legal Department to share step by step tips on how to maintain ACP and work product protections as an in-house attorney. We talk about the basic blocking and tackling of privilege hygiene and explore how AI is impacting this core legal protection.

This is Diana’s second tour of duty in The Legal Department–check her out on Episode 3!

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Listen to the Podcast here

 

In-House Privilege Redux: Diana Feinstein, Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP

Diana Feinstein, baseball stats.

My name is Diana Feinstein. I’m a Partner at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles, and a fun fact about me is that despite being quite good at school, I received an F in PE.

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In this episode, I’m really excited to welcome back for her second appearance, Diana Feinstein, who is a partner at Gibson Dunn. We are doing a privilege redux. Diana was an early adopter to the show. She was a guest on episode three on the same topic. Times have changed, we’ve got AI now, there’s a lot going on in privilege and I’m excited to welcome Diana back to talk about it. How are you?

I’m great. Thank you for having me back and it’s amazing. I said I was honored to be welcomed back again. You have such an esteemed list of folks who have come and spoken to you. Thank you for having me.

Love to have you back, and as we were talking before we got on, you are one of the few people I know who has been in the trenches, litigating privilege. I think especially in-house people don’t always realize that it is something that we need to mind, and cultivate, and maintain, and guard, and I want to get into it.

I’m going to refer everybody back to episode three where we went over some brass tacks. It was a really fun conversation but we’re going to talk about updates around privilege. You and I were talking before actually because there were several developments, the In re FirstEnergy case and some other cases that were really challenging the in-house privilege. Why don’t we just start with some basics. What are the rules of the road that in-house counsel need to know about when maintaining attorney-client privilege?

Legal Vs. Business Advice Distinction (The Basics)

The most important rule of the road, the number one rule of the road is legal advice is privileged, not business advice. What that means in actual practicality is a whole mess of things, and the way that courts come out on things is not always predictable. What that means for in-house counsel is there are certain types of things you can take into account when you are engaging with your business team members, and then it’s really important, almost more important, that you educate your business colleagues about what they can do to increase the chances, I will never say ensure, of maintaining privilege, should there be some legal fight down the way, which happens all too frequently.

The most important rule of the road: Legal advice is privileged, not business advice. Share on X

Just talk about on that difference between legal and business advice because there is a push, and I think in-house lawyers are encouraged to be business enablers and be included early on in deal conversations and strategy. Some of those conversations become relevant down the road in a dispute context. How do we ensure that those communications are privileged?

Not ensure, but increase the likelihood. The first way to do it is obviously label the document or the email. Privileged and confidential or attorney work product, so labeling, in making sure that you tell your business teams when they’re emailing you to label their emails that way. That, of course, can go the other way. You don’t want to over-label.

We can get into a whole series of discussion about what happens when you over-label. Labeling things. I think I’ve mentioned this when we spoke before. If you’re in the legal department or even a member of legal department, like a paralegal or an assistant to a GC, if you can have something in your signature line or something like that to indicate you’re legal, that always helps.

The tried-and-true way to look at this is ask yourself if somebody, like a judge, looking at this email or this text message or this Google Doc five years from now would say, “This person is actually soliciting legal advice as part of this business discussion,” or “This person is actually providing it,” versus “This is just a business discussion they’ve copied in a lawyer because they’ve copied in ten other people, but this does not have any element of seeking or providing legal advice.” it’s an art, it’s not a science. There are certainly things that you can include when you’re communicating on these subjects that will tell the judge later on, “This was legal advice.”

It’s as simple as putting the lawyer on the ‘To’ line and not the ‘CC’ line. It’s directing it to the lawyer. It can be mixed. “We’ve got this business issue, we’re looking at what how we should develop this particular product, but we also know that there are legal implications. Stacy, can you please weigh in on X?” That alone, gold. I wouldn’t have any concern that that would not be considered privilege by a court.

It’s important that I think in-house counsel are involved. I am so grateful I do a lot of work now with technology companies I am grateful that they have product counsel, and even better if they have litigation counsel involved early when they’re developing products and workshopping things. It’s important to demarcate why they’re involved as much as you can.

The Risk Of Over-Labeling & “Copying for Privilege”

I’ve started doing some education around that. One thing I’ve seen before, “Copying Stacy for privilege,” that’s the worst. How has that ever come up in a litigation context?

Yes it has, and it’s not good, and what people need to understand, can’t be so obvious about it. It needs to be genuine. Let me just tell you about how it works, and like let me tell you a war story of how it worked. Fortunately, was not involved in this. Google faced a case sanctions motion by the US government in a matter claiming that they intentionally trained their employees to just copy a lawyer, CC in for privilege, those types of things. The government moved for sanctions against Google based on that.

Now, the judge ultimately did not grant them, said, “Assuming this what the government’s theory is here is correct, I don’t think I can punish somebody for actions taken before this case,” but made the lawyers in that case go back and re-review 100,000 or something emails where they called them silent attorney emails where the attorneys were put on there but they didn’t see any response back from the attorney.

They were focused on the fact that there was a training that Google had done called Communicate with Care or something like that. Of types of things that we’re talking about right now on this show, but that was used against Google, which I think is outrageous, by the way. I think you should be wanting to have these types of trainings. It was used against them. Over-use and anything that looks like it’s being done intentionally to include a lawyer just to privilege it, that can really backfire.

Overusing privilege—or doing anything that looks like you’re intentionally involving a lawyer just to ‘privilege it’—can really backfire. Share on X

Privilege Challenges For Internal Legal Training

That is a really hot take, and I want to underline that for the readers. Let’s talk about training. There was a case in 2024 that I wanted to talk about. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to pronounce it right. It’s In re Diisocyanates Antitrust Litigation. It was an antitrust case, and an in-house lawyer had done some training about antitrust rules of the road.

It was a PowerPoint document, and the court found that that training that legal training was not privileged. I really wanted to talk about that because that’s something that in-house counsel pride themselves, that we are trying to be ahead of the curve. I do a lot of trainings, you want to avoid problems. It is disappointing that the court punished the company for doing that. What can you tell us about trainings?

First of all, I can’t pronounce the name of that case, so we’ll just say, “That case.” I was looking into that case, there’s a long history actually in particular about antitrust compliance policy case law out there. I personally don’t practice antitrust law, but in this space, trainings and antitrust in particular are hot topics when it comes to privilege.

Ultimately, the court there found, when you really look at it, I don’t think we should be so overly concerned that lawyers can’t train their business folks on things legal-related. In there, in particular, basically the judge found this was more akin it was more general in nature to a business policy, business practices, best practices. It was way more business-oriented. There was, in particular, something in the in the notes of that presentation that specifically said something to the effect of, “Do not rely on this presentation in lieu of specific legal advice.”

That was I think the thing that did them in. Strip that out of all your trainings. I understand why someone said that they didn’t want somebody to then feel like they were trained on all these complex legal issues and they could just, as a business person, make the decision. I think that case had that particular and the judge reviewed it in camera. This is another reminder these are not judges make these decisions on privilege often by looking at the documents in camera. They’re going to see it soup to nuts.

To your earlier comment framing it up intentionally as legal advice, not trying to dilute it as in the something that’s less than legal advice seems like a really good takeaway. I got to say, though, you don’t want people to take that PowerPoint and think they’re an expert and then run wild. “This isn’t a substitute, we are giving you an overview of what the legal issues are, but in the moment, I need you to come to me with legal issues.”

Yes, Stacy, the way you just framed that, that would have been perfect. If that was what the record was in that case, I think it could have gone the other way. That’s what it is. When you’re thinking as an in-house counsel, again, I’m thinking I’m looking at it later on. If I could have written the script, what would it have been? Exactly what you just said. First of all, I’d put Attorney-Client Privilege on that presentation, by the way. That’s an easy tip.

Two is just say to them “Look, we’re going to give you these legal pointers. This is legal advice. However, when you find yourself in one of these situations, we want to make sure you also come and consult us directly.” just that little thing could have saved that deck from being produced. I’m not familiar with the case, I don’t know how earth-shattering it is, but I can tell you from cases I’ve worked on, there are definitely some earth-shattering things that you do not want coming out.

Email’s a nightmare. Email and documents and our informal corporate communications, we don’t want those out. Certainly, if lawyers are advising, we want to shield those as much as possible.

Absolutely. I’ll just add what and I think I said this when we spoke last, but the worst is actually beyond email is text message. That’s the worst. That one’s hard. Someone asked me, I did a CLE. They’re like, “Should I label my text messages ‘Attorney-Client Privilege’?” I’m like, “Bless you if you did, but I don’t think that’s really realistic. If you’re having a conversation about a legal issue, you should make sure you’re including the in-house counsel on that text message at a minimum.”

Yeah, texts are the worst. They’re the absolute worst. Let’s talk about, so there’s the efforts to try to preserve and label and guard the privilege on conversations. Once you have a communication that’s out in the world, out in the wild, I always worry, and I’m sure other colleagues like me worry, “Where does it end up?” I always will tell the colleagues, “Please don’t send this,” or “Don’t forward,” but many times, they feel like it’s easier. “Look, the lawyer has framed it up for me and it’s easier for me to just forward.” What are some of the things we need to know in terms of waiver?

Waiver Of Privilege (High-Level & Internal/External)

Waiver, just at a high level, everyone knows is if you share an attorney-client communication with somebody who is not the client, that waives the privilege, unless there is a common interest. Work product, a little bit different, little bit different, cousin of privilege. That’s not necessarily waived if you share it with somebody who’s not the client as long as they’re not considered an adversary and there’s an expectation of confidentiality still with that person.

Everyone knows that if you share an attorney-client communication with someone who is not the client, it waives the privilege. Share on X

Work product can actually be shared in a broader place. Actually, to be fair in that scenario, I’d rather a business person forward the legal advice to another business person directly. The worst would be trying and summarize it in their own words and then they’re basically relaying quasi-probably-incorrect legal advice, and then there’s no lawyer on it. Obviously, the best thing is if you’re going to forward it to also include the lawyer on the forward.

Where I practice a lot, I do a lot of internal investigations, government defense, and then civil litigation. There’s a lot of trade-off decisions when you’re doing internal investigations or government work about whether you waive privilege to get better treatment. If anyone’s done internal investigations in employment, you want to put up certain defenses. You want to say that you did an investigation and part of that is showing all the work you’ve done, so you’ve basically put it at issue and you waived.

Waiver can actually be a good thing and can be helpful. Another common thing, often, people when they do an internal investigation, they would like to announce the results of that investigation, even at a high level. “We found no wrongdoing.” Even that, some people have argued, puts it at issue in a later civil context, and people try to get all the nuts and bolts and everything that went into that investigation based on just those headline statements. Waiver can have its benefits. Obviously, it can have its downfalls, which would be sharing something. Typically, privilege is maintained at a client when you say, “Within the company,” if it is shared within the group of people who must know need to know. That’s just another pointer seems obvious.

Let me ask. If I someone comes to me and wants my legal advice on something, I respond, give them the advice. What if two internal people are talk emailing back and forth with that email and not including me? Is their communication protected?

It can be, and I would certainly argue as your as somebody’s lawyer on their behalf that it is. It gets trickier if they’ve excluded the lawyer from that communication. Yeah, we withhold things and it’s proper to do so if what you’re doing is reflecting the attorney-client privileged advice in that business person-to-business person conversation. Removing the lawyer from that conversation, one thing you’ve taken off the table now that I, as the outside counsel, would be able to argue for.

It’s not unheard of. I get it. Sometimes you need to then take the legal advice and have the business discussion. What’s important is that business people keep it to the narrow group that it needs to be. Listservs can get people into trouble. Seen court cases where they’ve literally said, “Who’s on the listserv? How many people are on the listserv?”

The bigger it is, it looks less privileged.

Exactly. Obviously, we have to be realistic. The reason that in-house counsel is giving the legal advice is for the business to be able to move forward and do or not do something. We can’t hamstrung people to in their communications. The best thing is don’t put it in writing. That should have been the best rule. I’m sorry. Just say it orally, don’t write it. That being said, people should know, obviously, people can get asked questions in depositions and so it’s not like oral communications are free from these issues. People’s memories fade.

Yes. Obviously. I would say just culturally these days, people seem less and less open to having conversations. We’re communicating through IM or Slack. There’s a lot of nuance that’s missed in that, but I find it’s challenging sometimes to get people to like, “Let’s just pick up the phone or let’s just get on a Zoom call real quick.” you mentioned the difference between privilege and work product, and I think it would be helpful just to be 101 with people about what is work product?

Work product is the material that is prepared either by counsel or at the direction of counsel that reflects the mental impressions or strategy of the attorney. What’s great about work product is it extends beyond lawyers. Only lawyers can give legal advice that’s subject to attorney-client privilege. Work product can be created by any number of people working at the direction of the lawyers, and the material needs to be prepared either in connection with or in anticipation of litigation. Threatened litigation, it can mean regulatory investigation. It doesn’t just mean a lawsuit or something like that.

How proximate does it need to be?

Fairly proximate?

Not like, “Someday this might happen” but like “We’ve gotten an inquiry,” like, there’s a spectrum.

I’m dealing with this right now on a matter. A whistle let’s put it this way, a whistleblower puts in a complaint about some accounting issues. The board convenes a special committee to do an investigation to look into those issues and hires independent counsel, and they don’t have a lawsuit from that whistleblower at the moment. They don’t have a securities class action if they’re a public company, they don’t have a regulatory inquiry at this point. It is anticipated when somebody makes accounting issues of a company that maybe engages with investors or things of that nature, that those things are coming.

It’s reasonably foreseeable those things are coming, in particular if you don’t handle it the right way. In the case I’m thinking of right now, the regulatory inquiries didn’t come until about a year and change later. That doesn’t change the fact. The government takes forever to do things and it came. The anticipation was about a year later.

I would certainly argue, and will argue, that it was anticipated. Also, in those moments, also with a whistleblower, you’re always anticipating maybe the whistleblower will sue us. Maybe the subject of the investigation will sue us. I think anybody in those circumstances would say that’s reasonable. Obviously, there’s plaintiffs’ lawyers out there who’d argue otherwise.

From a hygiene perspective, marking things work product? Do you need to say, “In anticipation of litigation?”

What’s important is to say, “Prepared at the direction of counsel,” or, “Attorney work product and prepared at the direction of counsel,” particularly if you’re not the counsel. That’s the main thing to have on there. These things can cover a lot of areas. I’ve litigated cases where we’ve argued for a crisis management or PR firm that was retained by counsel to help advise, help the lawyers provide legal advice to the client, but even the internal communications between the PR firm without the lawyers on them were work product, we argued, and we were successful.

It was for somewhere where you used to work. Honestly, that could be a crapshoot depending on the judge. Anyway, the point is so it’s important that any external consultants or experts or things that you’re working with mark their materials appropriately. Again, it just comes back to what would somebody who’s looking at this five years later going to think what was the reason for it. You can always put in more evidence. People put in declarations and things like that, but that never holds the weight of what is actually on the four corners.

Maintaining Privilege In Internal Investigations

Contemporaneous document. All right, you’ve mentioned investigations a few times and we did talk about this in episode three but I do want to refresh. I was at a distance following the In re FirstEnergy case which is, if people haven’t read about it, it is like a drama with public corruption and all kinds of twists and turns, but the attorney-client privilege and privilege of an internal investigation that was conducted by external counsel was in the crosshairs.

The lower court found that, and again, I feel like from our prior conversation and my experience the best-in-class approach of privilege is to have an outside law firm engaged and direct the investigation, which was the case in this case. The lower court found no privilege. It was reversed by the Sixth Circuit, but I wonder if you could just give us an overview of what is the best hygiene. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that case.

I am familiar with that case and it was insane, and we were all gripping. I think you and I emailed about it when it was happening and the decision hadn’t come out yet, and I pointed out a huge number of people filed briefs in support of amicus briefs just being like, “This would completely upend how businesses operate and how you want them to operate.”

Thankfully, the Sixth Circuit, and I’d say a beautiful decision, very politely said to the district court, “I don’t know what you were thinking, but this is crazy.” Basically, the reasoning of the lower court was, yes, we understand you hired outside counsel to do this investigation, but because then the business made some decisions and acted upon the results of that investigation, the whole investigation was business-motivated, not legal-motivated.

Meanwhile, in this case, you want to talk about proximity, this wasn’t like they had to wait a year and a half for a regulatory matter to happen. There were criminal indictments and securities class actions and everything right there. It was crazy. That being said, that case, as crazy as it was, so ultimately, the judge there was very clear and was like, “Companies, if no question they hired this for a legal purpose, they had to make decisions about whether or not they had complied with the law, how to fix it. Those are all legal decisions. The fact that you then also make business decisions is irrelevant because you’re always going to make business decisions, you’re a business, but they were primarily legal,” and shot that down.

Doesn’t mean there haven’t been some other cases sometimes where there are investigations going on, even by outside counsel, and ultimately, courts have found that they don’t constitute a privileged investigation. Often that’s in the case where it’s a highly regulated something that a company they basically the cases are, you would be doing it anyway. You chose to have outside counsel do it, but you would have to do this anyway. It’s a requirement.

You’re regulated by the Federal Reserve, you have to do these internal audits. The fact that you chose to have an outside counsel do it or even your in-house counsel do it doesn’t make it privileged. That’s a little tricky, and in those cases, to be fair, it wasn’t the entire thing wasn’t privileged, so the outside counsel actually giving very specific legal advice would be, but things like the interview notes and the crux of it, those did have to be produced. Ultimately, I think, and this isn’t a plug for outside counsel, but the reality is it’s not a surefire way, but certainly hiring outside counsel to conduct an investigation is going to increase the chances that it remains privileged. That’s just the reality.

The fact that you chose to use outside counsel—or even your in-house counsel—doesn't automatically make it privileged. Share on X

Is there any risk of a I’m just going to call it a set it and forget it approach where like you do get the outside counsel to do the engagement letter and everything? If the outside counsel isn’t actually really hands-on, is there any risk that that privilege is undercut?

I also would question the law firm that would necessarily do that. Only because typically, if you’re hiring an outside firm to do it, it’s because you want the additional layer. I did one for a tech company where it comes with an extra layer of diligence and seriousness that you lose if you don’t actually have them do that work. You’re paying for something that you wouldn’t be getting and you’d be risking. Also, it’s a similar thing, Stacy, to in-house counsel can sometimes don’t have all the resources to conduct an internal investigation themselves. They may basically charge somebody like HR or the compliance department with doing the internal investigation.

Just like that outside counsel, it can’t just be a letter charging them with it and then they go off and do it on their own and then they come back at the very end and give a report to the in-house counsel. The in-house counsel still has to direct it. You still need to involve the in-house counsel, you need to include them on things regularly, regularly have updates.

Their materials need to say, “Prepared at the direction of counsel,” things like that. There are ways you can craft internal investigations, even within the business, and maintain privilege. It’s obviously not as safe as hiring outside counsel, but you can do it. You can’t just let them go off and do it and then come back to it at the end. That is not likely to withhold scrutiny if litigated.

We did talk a little bit more about that, I just didn’t know if the state of play had changed since that In re FirstEnergy case.

No, other than people were very scared and held on their heads.

I phoned a friend. I called you and I was like, “Oh my gosh.”

That would have been completely groundbreaking. I think they hopefully would have taken that to the Supreme Court. I think much more where we see internal investigations, again, becoming waiver happening is where you’ve got engagement with the government or some of that form, and there’s cases on that very clear.

If you share things with the government, even if you try to just do it orally, if you’ve got some risk of a civil case, you need to assume those civil plaintiffs are going to try and get every single thing you did in that investigation and claim that the fact that you shared information, your findings, your interview highlights with the government waives the whole investigation, and there are cases that have found that.

That’s a rock and a hard place. The government put their foot pretty much on the back of your neck to get you to waive is what I understand. You have to deal with the problem in front of you, even though there is more concern at your doorstep.

I think you need to make sure you have skilled people in there who can see around all the corners. Sometimes, what you’ll have is the civil litigation sometimes comes later and people don’t think about it. They have somebody who’s really involved in the niche area with some regulator, but they’re not thinking about what’s happening later on.

My practice, which I really enjoy, is both the mix of the civil and the white collar. Sometimes we’re happening at the same time, sometimes they’re not, but because I do both I’m always thinking about, “If we say this here, we push this lever, what’s going to happen over there?” Ultimately, it’s a business decision. You’re right. The DOJ is about as big as it gets, and if that is the risk and you think you can get a better settlement out of them or a non-prosecution agreement by sharing information, probably that makes sense, but you’re going to pay for it on the other end.

Impact of AI Tools On Privilege & Work Product

A lot of tough choices. With the time we have left, I do want to talk about AI and the impact of AI tools on the privilege. I’ve done probably 5 or 6 episodes about AI and I think that there are some rules of the road, some basics about not putting confidential information into public tools. I know before we got on, were talking about a case that came out. I don’t know if you did this as part of your CLE, but what are some good tips for managing privilege with AI?

First tip is, I love all these AI tools that can be in your Zooms or in your Teams meetings and summarize the meeting.

All these AI tools that summarize your Zoom or Teams meetings sound great in theory—but you need to turn them off if you want to maintain privilege. Share on X

I don’t.

I love it in theory, but you need to turn those off if you’re trying to maintain privilege. Especially work product. This hasn’t been litigated yet, but I am almost certain, some of them create transcripts. A transcript is not going to be work product. You’ve now lost the ability to be like, “These are attorney notes that reflect my mental impressions.” It’s just a transcript. As nice as it would be to say, “Let’s not have a junior associate on or whatever and pay that rate for that person to take notes,” if you’re just going to run AI, I think you should assume there’s no work product. Whatever has been discussed in that interview is going to come out.

I think that if you are feeding in anything that is privileged into an AI tool, I think the decision there wasn’t really a clear court case out there. The question came down to, is serving it up to an AI company considered sharing it with a third party and you waive privilege? A lot of people were saying you need to look to the terms of service of the AI tool. It’s akin to how people exchanging personal emails on work email accounts. Similar, you look to the employee handbook and things like that. This case, the decision hasn’t come out yet, but from the bench it was it’s US v. Heppner, I think it is in SDNY, Judge Rakoff said that it was a criminal defendant who, in order to help organize his recollection of facts, fed a bunch of information into an AI tool.

He said he was doing it and then he sent it off to his lawyer, so was relaying facts to his lawyer to help the lawyer come up with legal strategy. That typically would be privileged. He fed his thoughts and stuff into an AI tool, the AI tool spit out the summary, that’s what he sent to the lawyer. Importantly, he did not do it at the direction of counsel. He did it on his own. The court did acknowledge that had he done it at the direction of counsel maybe would have been a harder call, but he also the judge also noted that he fed this stuff into an AI tool. There we have it. It’s a decision, it’s not out yet. Again, it came from the bench in SDNY. US v. Heppner.

There was another case. We didn’t preview this, but in the New York Times-OpenAI case and it was reporter’s privilege. I want to do a whole episode about the e-discovery impact of AI. The judge refused to require New York Times to give over, I don’t know which tool they used, but they used an AI tool, for some of their sources. Under the reporter’s privilege, the court didn’t compel production of their chats, which I thought was interesting. More to come. I think this is just an emerging area.

There is a case though that did order, by the way, prompts that you put in. There was a case right the in ND Cal that basically whatever the plaintiffs put in, their lawyers or whatever put in, as prompts to basically test some of their theory before bringing the case, and the judge said, “That’s not work product and you put it through an AI tool. You have to produce it.”

People should underline that. That’s a double-click moment because, again, it depends what tool you use. If you’re using just a public version of ChatGPT or one of the other tools versus maybe a legal-only tool. I think we’re going to see where this goes.

Yes. Our firm has all kinds of tools but the version that has been vetted as just for Gibson Dunn. I don’t know exactly how all the ins and outs of that work. I just know it’s very strict on what we can use precisely for this reason. Got to protect people’s privilege.

Diana, I always love talking to you. I would like to have you back again because privilege is evolving and it’s something, again, I feel like is an in-house 101 that people need to be keeping their finger on the pulse. Appreciate you coming back a second time.

Thank you so much for having me. I guess I’m a nerd and love talking about privilege, but happy that you will indulge me, and hopefully, it’s helpful to folks. We’re definitely living in a time where these things are evolving. We can talk in a year from now and there will probably be many more decisions in this AI space that can help guide people.

Some of us are going to have to learn the hard way. All right, you did give me a pump-up song last time, but I’ve been pushing you to be a little more out-of-the-box, so what is your pump-up song?

My current pump-up song is All the Things She Said, which is prompted by my absolute obsession with the show Heated Rivalry, which I recommend. That’s it. That’s all I’ll say. That’s my favorite. It’s like constantly on loop. Even my kids are into the song now because it’s just on in the car.

I’m sure they’re not watching that show, though.

They’re not watching the show.

I think we need an NC-17 warning on that.

Yes. The song is a good one. I’ll add Taylor Swift. When I was here last time, I was not a Swiftie and my now eight-year-old got me into Taylor Swift and I am a huge Swiftie now. Anything Taylor Swift.

 

Important Links

• Diana Feinstein
• Crumbs, Silver Bullets & Google Docs: How To Protect The Attorney-Client Privilege In The Legal Department With Diana Feinstein Of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher
• Diana Feinstein on LinkedIn

 

About Diana Feinstein

Diana M. Feinstein is a partner in the Century City office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. She is a member of the firm’s White Collar Defense and Investigations, Litigation, and Class Actions Practice Groups.

Diana’s practice centers on white collar defense and investigations, with a particular emphasis on complex internal investigations and enforcement matters brought by the Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Trade Commission. She regularly advises companies, boards and senior executives in high-stakes matters involving criminal, civil and regulatory exposure.

In recognition of her work, Diana has been selected by her peers for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America® in the field of Criminal Defense: White Collar. In addition to her investigations practice, she represents clients in complex litigation, including consumer class actions, securities disputes and high-value commercial litigation.

Diana’s experience spans a wide range of industries, including technology, financial services, entertainment, insurance, healthcare, transportation, real estate, manufacturing and consumer products. Drawing on her dual investigations and litigation practice, she has deep expertise navigating parallel proceedings involving criminal, civil and regulatory components, particularly in crisis-driven matters where early strategic decision-making is critical.

She also has significant experience managing electronic discovery and digital forensics, which frequently play a central role in large-scale investigations and complex disputes. Diana is a frequent speaker on issues such as attorney-client privilege, parallel proceedings and electronic discovery.