Defendants copied around 33,000 litigation files and sent them to insurers, plaintiffs allege

The California Court of Appeal recently dealt with a case where attorney-client privileges for communications in relation to a workers’ compensation proceeding were allegedly breached during a conspiracy to “hack” litigation files uploaded in a third-party computer system.

In Casillas et al. v. Berkshire Hathaway Homestate Insurance Company et al., workers’ compensation and personal injury attorneys and their clients would upload their files in a computer database of a third-party company. The third-party company had computer servers, a database housed on such servers, and a website that provided access to the database.

As legal proceedings progressed, the lawyers, their staff, and the clients would use usernames and passwords to revise, comment on, and download the documents via the third-party company’s website.

The plaintiffs in this case were clients whose litigation files were in the database. They filed a suit alleging that the defendants were liable for the tort of trespass to chattels and seeking compensatory damages and other relief. They claimed that:

• Three insurance companies and two individual defendants conspired to “hack” the third-party computer system;
• At the direction of the insurance companies, the individual defendants copied around 33,000 litigation files, including those relating to the plaintiffs, in the computer system and sent the copies to insurers and to...

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