Opinion
No. 98 C 7108
October 15, 2001
MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER
On October 1, 2001, we directed defendant to furnish to the court various documents for in camera review, and it has done so. The documents are from the files of Melvin Katzman, vice-president and associate general counsel and, with few exceptions, they are privileged or work product, or both. Most contain the handwritten editing of various documents by, presumably, the legal department, documents which, it appears, would have been published in a final form and have long since been furnished to plaintiffs in that form. A couple are lists of persons taking early retirement and Katzman was on the distribution list. Those may well not be privileged but are wholly irrelevant to the issues here. In one instance the attorneys for an employee complained that she almost qualified for VSRP, but did not quite, and therefore she was being discriminated against, and the defendant replied. Those two documents are not privileged (although not at all relevant), but the workup of how to respond is privileged. And some deal with specific legal issues. In short, plaintiffs are entitled to but a few documents (and, we suggest, would not get any comfort from the others). The motion to compel is granted as indicated and is otherwise denied.