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City bombing and thus were received by petitioner as the agent of
McVeigh.
Petitioners assert that general principles of agency law do
not resolve the issue of ownership, and they rely instead on
several cases from other jurisdictions that have considered the
issue of ownership of client case files. Those cases generally
hold that an attorney or accountant, not his client, has property
rights in the portions of his client’s case file containing the
professional’s self-created work product or working papers,
generally defined as the attorney’s or accountant’s notes,
drafts, and internal memoranda recording the professional’s
ideas, opinions, and impressions. See Corrigan v. Armstrong,
Teasdale, Schlafly, Davis & Dicus, 824 S.W.2d 92, 96 (Mo. Ct.
App. 1992). For similar holdings with respect to accountants and
their working papers, see also Ipswich Mills v. Dillon, 157 N.E.
604 (Mass. 1927), and Ablah v. Eyman, 365 P.2d 181 (Kan. 1961).
Although petitioners rely heavily on these cases, they represent
a small fraction of the jurisdictions that have considered the
issue of ownership of an attorney’s or an accountant’s work
product.
The majority of courts that have considered the issue of
whether attorneys or clients own case files have held that
clients are the legal owners of their entire case files,
including the attorney’s work product for which the client paid
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