Protecting Digital Legal Professional Privilege (LPP) Data

Abstract

To enable free communication between legal advisor and his client for proper functioning of the legal system, certain documents, known as legal professional privilege (TPP) documents, can be excluded as evidence for prosecution. In physical world, protection of TPP information is well addressed and proper procedure for handling TPP articles has been established. However, there does not exist a forensically sound procedure for protecting "digital" TPP information. In this paper, we try to address this important, but rarely addressed, issue. We point out the difficulties of handling digital TPP data and discuss the shortcomings of the current practices, then we propose a feasible procedure for solving this problem.