MIMEDX GROUP INC v. PERRING (2020)

District Court of Appeal of Florida, Fourth District.

MIMEDX GROUP, INC., Petitioner, v. Fraser John PERRING, Gabriel Bernarde, Aidan Lau and Parker H. Petit, Respondents.

No. 4D20-573

Decided: July 01, 2020

Kathryn Lee Ender and David M. Hawthorne of Lewis Brisbois Bigaard & Smith LLP, Fort Lauderdale, Grace Mead of Sterns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson, P.A., Miami, and Isaac Adams and Daniel J. Hay of Sidney Austin LLP, Washington, DC, pro hac vice for petitioner. Richard M. Elias and Todd Friedman of Elias LLC, St. Louis, Missouri, for respondents.

MiMedx Group, Inc. (MiMedx) seeks certiorari review of a circuit court order compelling it to produce a report authored by an outside law firm that MiMedx's audit committee retained to investigate and advise regarding claims of corporate misconduct. The court departed from the essential requirements of law in overruling its attorney-client privilege and work product objections without first conducting in camera review. See Am. Airlines, Inc. v. Cimino, 279 So. 3d 200, 202-03 (Fla. 4th DCA 2019); Old Holdings, Ltd. v. Taplin, Howard, Shaw & Miller, P.A., 584 So. 2d 1128, 1128-29 (Fla. 4th DCA 1991). We grant this petition, quash the order, and remand for further proceedings.

On remand, the court should carefully reconsider its analysis of Southern Bell Telephone & Telegraph Co. v. Deason, 632 So. 2d 1377 (Fla. 1994), as that decision addressed multiple classifications of documents, some of which the court ruled were protected from discovery.

Petition granted, order quashed and remanded for further proceedings.

Per Curiam.

Conner, Klingensmith and Kuntz, JJ., concur.

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