On 16 April 2026, Mr Justice Picken handed down judgment in Aabar Holdings S.À.R.L. & Others v Glencore plc & Ors [2026] EWHC 877 (Comm), giving important guidance on the scope of legal advice privilege for corporate clients in the light of Three Rivers (No 5).

The Court confirmed that legal advice privilege can cover certain “intra‑client” communications: internal communications between employees or agents within an identified “client group”, where they are created for the dominant purpose of seeking or receiving legal advice, even where no lawyer is a sender or recipient.

Background and the issue

Legal advice privilege is commonly understood to protect confidential lawyer–client communications made for the dominant purpose of giving or receiving legal advice, lawyers’ working papers, and a limited category of internal documents that would reveal the substance of legal advice.

Where the client is a corporation, Three Rivers (No 5) treats “the client” as the group of employees or agents authorised to seek and receive legal advice on the company’s behalf (the “client group”). Communications between that client group and other employees are not generally privileged.

The question in Aabar v Glencore was what happens within the client group itself: whether internal “intra‑client” documents (communications between members of the client group, and documents created by them, in each case without any lawyer being party to the communication) can attract legal advice privilege, or whether privilege is confined to documents that record or reveal actual lawyer–client communications (or were intended to be sent to lawyers but were not).

The decision

Mr Justice Picken held that legal advice privilege can attach to intra‑client documents where they were created for the dominant purpose of seeking legal advice. In reaching that conclusion, the Court treated “intra‑client” communications as a distinct category, which were principally concerned with the line between lawyer–client communications (privileged) and communications between the client and third parties (not privileged).

The Court rejected a narrower approach under which intra‑client documents would be privileged only if they record or reveal the substance of lawyer–client communications, or if they were intended to be provided to lawyers but were not in fact sent.

Practical implications

The decision is likely to be welcomed by organisations in litigation, because it supports a broader approach to protecting the internal process of seeking advice within a properly constituted client group, and allows greater certainty around discussions of legal advice to be sought.

However, the dominant purpose test remains central, and disputes are likely to focus on whether the true dominant purpose was obtaining legal advice, as opposed to operational, editorial, commercial or strategic decision‑making running in parallel. Mixed‑purpose email chains and wide internal distribution lists will still require close scrutiny for the purposes of disclosure.

The judgment also does not remove the Three Rivers (No 5) “cliff‑edge”: the question of whether a communication is privileged may still turn on whether a particular individual is within (or outside) the client group.

What organisations should do now

It remains important to identify (and keep under review) who is authorised to seek and receive legal advice for the organisation on a given issue, and to manage communications so that communications for the purposes of obtaining legal advice are kept distinct from wider operational discussions where possible.

This decision should not displace established best practice: the “client” group should be clear and, where feasible, sensitive communications should be channelled to or from lawyers. The intra‑client analysis is likely to be most valuable as a supporting argument where privilege is challenged.   In the meantime, companies may take some comfort that there is greater certainty over the privilege of documents created for the purposes of seeking legal advice.

The judgment is available on the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary website.