US judge orders plaintiff attorneys to remedy ethical concerns in Energizer case
( January 26, 2026, 16:55 GMT | Official Statement) -- MLex Summary: A US judge found there's "a tenable argument" that counsel for Portable Power violated their ethical obligations to alert defendant Energizer that they received attorney-client communications from an Energizer customer service representative in 2020, in a case where Portable Power alleges Energizer violated antitrust law by conspiring with Walmart to inflate wholesale disposable battery prices. Though the court acknowledged that "it is also plausible that Plaintiffs' counsel reasonably assumed the Disputed Emails were neither privileged nor inadvertently produced in light of" voluntary production, US Magistrate Judge Susan Van Keulen said the plaintiffs are to provide a list of every attorney who received the disputed material, certify on a "law-firm-by-law-firm basis" that the materials are destroyed, conduct an investigation as to whether third parties have retained or destroyed the material, and provide declarations from each attorney of record attesting that the disputed materials "have not been used to date in the litigation for any purpose other than to address the Joint Submission and the meet and confer preceding it," in an unsealed order filed in the US Northern District of California. See attached document: ...
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