Nature of the Case
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Facts
P occupies a 900,000-acre reservation in northern New Mexico. The land contains timber, gravel, and oil and gas reserves, which are developed pursuant to statutes administered by the Department of the Interior. Proceeds derived from these natural resources are held by the United States in trust for P pursuant to the American Indian Trust Fund Management Reform Act of 1994. P sued D for breach-of-trust. P alleges that D failed to invest its trust funds properly. P claims that D failed to maximize returns on its trust funds, invested too heavily in short-term maturities, and failed to pool its trust funds with other tribal trusts. During discovery, D withheld 226 potentially relevant documents as protected by the attorney-client privilege, the attorney work-product doctrine, or the deliberative-process privilege. the Court of Federal Claims (CFC) granted P's motion to compel in part. The CFC concluded that the trust relationship between D and P is sufficiently analogous to a common-law trust relationship that the common law exception should apply. D appealed. It held that D cannot deny P's request to discover communications between the United States and its attorneys based on the attorney-client privilege when those communications concern management of an Indian trust and the United States has not claimed that the government or its attorneys considered a specific competing interest in those communications. The Supreme Court granted certiorari.
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