The Supreme Court issued no opinions this week. The Appellate Division issued just one published ruling.

C.S. v. Brick Recycling Co., ___ N.J. Super. ___ (App. Div. 2026). In what Judge Sabatino rightly called the “seminal opinion in Payton v. New Jersey Tpk. Auth., 148 N.J. 524 (1997),” the Supreme Court addressed issues of attorney-client privilege and the attorney work product doctrine. As the issue in the C.S. case, before the Appellate Division on leave to appeal, was whether the Law Division correctly held, after in camera review, that documents withheld from discovery production by defendants were privileged or protected as work product, and whether defendants had waived those protections, much of Judge Sabatino’s opinion was devoted to discussing Payton and its many ramifications.

The panel’s ruling was very fact-intensive, and readers would do well to review the entire opinion. But the bottom line was that “the trial court conducting an in camera review must consider each withheld document, page-by-page, and (depending on the contents), line-by-line, to assess whether the material appears to be within the scope of the attorney-client or work-product privileges and, if so, whether that material is sufficiently (i.e., not tenuously) related to an employer's affirmative defense to be disclosable.”

That did not occur here. Nor did the court address waiver issues that were presented or “whether its in camera review identified any items or passages that should not be disclosed or should be redacted because they are only ‘tenuously’—if at all—related to the affirmative defense” that “[d]efendants acted in good faith, without malice, and with the reasonable belief that their actions were reasonable under the existing facts and circumstances."

Therefore, while not being critical of the trial court, the Appellate Division found itself “constrained to remand this matter to the trial court for a renewed, and more fulsome, in camera review of the disputed … documents, in light of the guidance we have set forth herein. The court shall issue written determinations with its statements of reasons, without prejudice to the right of either party to move to seek further interlocutory appellate review.” The panel vacated the Law Division’s decision and remanded with additional instructions.