Comment by piker
11 hours ago
> Edit: after reading up on this it looks like attorneys have strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth), but the Associated Press was a third party who unredacted public court documents in a separate Facebook case.
Curious. I am not a litigator but this is surprising if you found support for it. My gut was that the general obligation to be a zealous advocate for your client would require a litigant to use inadvertently disclosed information unless it was somehow barred by the court. Confidentiality obligations would remain owed to the client, and there might be some tension there but it would be resolvable.
My recollection is that it varies quite a bit between jurisdictions. The ABA's model rules require you to notify the other party when they accidentally send you something but leave unspecified what else, if anything, you might have to do.
A famous case where this came into play was one of the Infowars defamation suits. Alex Jones’s lawyer accidentally sent the families’ lawyer the full contents of a phone backup. They notified Jones’s lawyer, and gave him some time to reply. After that time elapsed, the whole dump was considered fair game.
This is the moment when that mistake was revealed in court: https://youtu.be/pgxZSBfGXUM and this is the hearing for the emergency motion to suppress that data: https://youtu.be/dKbAmNwbiMk
I’m unclear why this is downvoted given the below. While it would theoretically be jurisdiction-specific, if the ABA model rules don’t provide some specific guidance, it’s clear that the lawyers would be ethically obligated to use whatever info they obtained if it helped their client and as otherwise consistent with their ethical obligations in the jurisdictions that follow those. I’m admitted in New York, and I don’t recall any kind of bar on the usage of this type of info there. Seems like in a lot of jurisdictions they’d have a duty to notify, but that may not even be the case in all.