November 2018

In this installment of The In-House Advisor, we interview Bill Gabovitch, General Counsel at Primark U.S. Corp. Primark is a fast-fashion retailer, based in Europe, with 350 stores in 10 countries. The company’s first U.S. store opened three years ago – in the former Filene’s space at Downtown Crossing, Boston – and it now operates nine stores in five Northeast states. Bill is a former associate general counsel at Staples, a former associate at two Boston law firms, and a graduate of Indiana University and the University of Pennsylvania School Of Law. He lives in Newton, MA, with his wife Lauren and their daughters Rebecca and Naomi.

The In-House Advisor: What do you see as the main focus of your role as in-house counsel, and how do you see that role evolving over the next few years?

Bill Gabovitch: Overall, the value that an in-house counsel brings to the table is in how much he or she helps the business achieve its objectives with the lowest reasonable risk. Sometimes that involves helping on a transaction or a strategy, or choosing the right way to deliver the company’s products or services to the market, after properly assessing for … Keep reading

While most parties and their counsel are vigilant in keeping their communications confidential, so as to avoid any chance that the attorney-client privilege can be invaded, there are some situations in which a party makes a tactical decision to waive that privilege. When this happens, courts generally agree that such a waiver will extend to all communications on the same “subject matter” as the disclosed communications. Having said that, however, there do not appear to be any general guidelines or bright-line tests to determine what is meant by the subject matter of a communication. Rather, such analyses are done on a case-by-case basis.

While trying to determine what a court will define as the scope of the subject matter of a particular communication can be a bit like reading tea leaves, a related area that is even more fraught with peril is where a party decides to have counsel undertake an investigation and then publicizes some or all of a report generated from that investigation. Indeed, this is the exact, and unfortunate, position in which the Hamilton County (Tennessee) Board of Education found itself earlier this year.

In 2015, three members of a high school basketball team located in … Keep reading