26.10 - 1. Legal Staff

• Jurisdiction: New York

1. Legal Staff

Courts generally extend the privilege to non-lawyer employees with “a menial or ministerial responsibility that involves relating communications to an attorney.”³⁷³⁰ The Second Circuit has observed:

The complexities of modern existence prevent attorneys from effectively handling clients’ affairs without the help of others; few lawyers could now practice without the assistance of secretaries, file clerks, telephone operators, messengers, clerks not yet admitted to the bar, and aides of other sorts. “The assistance of these agents being indispensable to his work and the communications of the client being often necessarily committed to them by the attorney or

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