This section contains the nature of the case and procedural background.

The University of Illinois (D) fired P from his job as an information technology manager after printed copies of a professor's privileged emails suspiciously ended up in P's home newspaper box. The emails allegedly exposed inconsistencies in the professor's testimony in a separate lawsuit that P was pursuing against a different professor. P's lawyer in the lawsuit filed the emails with the court. After finding that it was 'more probable than not' that P improperly obtained the emails himself, D fired P. P sued the university's board of trustees and several university officials alleging that he was fired without due process of law both before and after his firing, and that his firing violated an Illinois whistle-blower statute. The district court dismissed the case. On appeal, this court held that P had pleaded a plausible claim that he was fired without pre-termination due process of law, but that his decision to withdraw from the post-termination hearing foreclosed his due process claim based on the post-termination procedures. On remand, the district court granted summary judgment for some Ds. A pre-trial ruling held that P could not offer as evidence a document protected by the attorney-client privilege that D had inadvertently turned over to P in discovery. The document in question was a memorandum dated June 30, 2010, from associate university counsel Rhonda Perry to Dean Adesida. The Perry memorandum bore the bold, all-caps heading: 'ATTORNEY-CLIENT COMMUNICATION PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL.' D and/or his lawyer photographed the document with a cell phone and stayed silent for about a year. About one year after the production-P's lawyer broke the silence and tried to surprise Adesida and the university with the document. D's outside counsel said that the document was 'inadvertently disclosed' and that the privilege had not been waived, instructed Adesida not to answer questions about the substance of the document, and requested that P's lawyer destroy all copies of the Perry memorandum in his possession. D's lawyer represented to the district court that his firm logged the Perry memorandum as a 'legal memo' attached to one email and as an 'outline' attached to another email but did not otherwise identify it. The logged emails were either internal or between the university and its outside counsel or outside counsel's staff. P lost at trial on his claim against three remaining Ds for denial of due process of law before he was fired. D filed a prompt motion to compel P's counsel to return the Perry memorandum and to bar the plaintiff from using it as evidence. The district court granted the motion. P lost at trial and appealed raising issues of waiver of attorney client privilege.

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