Legal professional privilege
secrecy of law advice to clients
In common law jurisdictions and some civil law jurisdictions, legal professional privilege protects all communications between a professional legal adviser (a solicitor, barrister or attorney) and their clients from being disclosed without the permission of the client. The privilege is that of the client and not that of the lawyer.
The purpose behind this legal principle is to protect an individual's ability to access the justice system by encouraging complete disclosure to legal advisers without the fear that any disclosure of those communications may prejudice the client in the future.
History
The common law principle of legal professional privilege is of extremely long standing. The earliest recorded instance of the principle in English case-law dates from 1577 in the case of Berd v. Lovelace the full report of which states:
Thomas Hawtry, gentleman, was served with a subpoena to testify his knowledge touching the cause in variance; and made oath that he hath been, and yet is a solicitor in this suit, and hath received several fees of the defendant; which being informed to the Master of the Rolls, it is ordered that the said Thomas Hawtry shall not be compelled to be deposed, touching the same; and that he shall be in no danger of any contempt, touching the not executing of the same process.
The principle originated as protection for individuals when accessing the knowledge and legal resources available to a lawyer and was said to stem from the "oath and honour" of the lawyer, a sort of special contractual relationship. It was based on the fact that the ordinary citizen could not safely navigate the complexities of the law and justice system without some assistance. However, without protection the quality of the advice would suffer as clients would be discouraged from making full disclosure to their legal representatives. As Lord Brougham put it in Greenough v Gaskell (1833):
The foundation of this rule is not difficult to discover.
“Legal professional privilege” enters the record as secrecy of law advice to clients. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Legal, professional and privilege can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Legal professional privilege” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Legal, professional and privilege provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q10379823. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1577 and 1833.
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This entry incorporates text from “Legal professional privilege” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.