That tactic is strongly recommended against. If there is an indication that someone is evading discovery by using their private email, then the private email becomes discoverable. Judges take avoidance antics very poorly, generally.
I had to sue the City of Chicago because one of the Mayor's main policy consultants was using gmail for most of their work. Sure the judge frowned on it and I won the case.... but well over a year later after litigation ended and the relevant reporting already came out. Didn't notice until a couple months after litigation ended that a full year was missing from the doc, and we'd have had to litigate again.
For example, in NJ Board of Ed members are elected officials. If they conduct board business in their personal phones or other devices or accounts, they are discoverable.
However, a judge ruled that, to protect their privacy, if this arises then Open Public Records Act (or State version of FOIA) request search on private phones can only be done by the phone’s owner, not the OPRA administrator.
So suddenly you have to trust individual board members to actually search their phones properly and not just lie.
In my case a board member was in this situation and just said “I deleted those texts”.
Which maybe is a technical violation of OPRA, but the penalties are a slap on the wrist here in NJ.
I find it pretty understandable that politicians would end up with the personal and professional blurred together to be honest - it's not really a job that lends itself to a clear distinction between the two. You can't really separate the Obama Presidency from Obama.
> As for “flagrant misuse of the attorney-client privilege,” that refers to Google’s “Communicate with Care” initiative. Google trained its employees to add its in-house lawyers on “any written communication regarding Rev Share [RSA] and MADA.” ... It also instructed that, when “dealing with a sensitive issue” via email, to “ensure the email communication is privileged” employees could add a “lawyer in [the] ‘to’ field,” “mark ‘Attorney/Client Privileged,” and “ask the lawyer a question.” ... Google employees assiduously followed that advice... As a result, Google’s outside counsel in this case initially withheld tens of thousands records on the grounds of privilege, which ultimately were rereviewed, deemed not privileged, and produced to Plaintiffs... This creation of faux privileged materials, Plaintiffs contend, “demonstrates that Google intended to harm competition through its contracting practices and its supposed procompetitive justifications were simply pretext.” ...
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. GOOGLE LLC (1:20-cv-03010) (citations omitted)
That one weird trick which does not really work
Hey, Joey, we still gonna whack that guy tonight? CC'ing my lawyer here like I always do when we're planning to murder guys.