Yesterday the Third District California Court of Appeal created important new precedent on a controversial issue, finding that where an employee used her employer’s computer to send e-mails to her attorney about a potential lawsuit against her employer, the attorney-client privilege did not apply.

The court wrote that e-mailing legal counsel using an employer’s computer was “akin to consulting [a] lawyer in [the] employer’s conference room, in a loud voice, with the door open, so that any reasonable person would expect that their discussion of [their] complaints about [their] employer would be overheard.”