23 applicants, one in-house attorney, and a privilege claim that didn’t survive appeal
City of Torrance tried to keep its criminal-history hiring files under lock and key. A California appeals court just forced them open.
The case, decided September 29, 2026, and certified for publication October 27, turned on a pointed question: can a city hide applicant screening documents behind attorney-client privilege because a lawyer helped prepare them?
The court’s answer was no.
It started with a custodian applicant who got a contingent job offer from Torrance in September 2022. A background check turned up multiple convictions. The city pulled the offer. The applicant complained to California’s Civil Rights Department, alleging discrimination based on his criminal record under the Fair Chance Act.
That law - Government Code section 12952 - stops employers from asking about conviction history before making a conditional job offer. After the offer, a background check is allowed, but the employer can only rescind it after conducting what the statute calls an “individualized assessment” - weighing the seriousness of the offenses, how long ago they occurred, and how relevant they are to the job.
Torrance said it followed the rules. It told the CRD the applicant’s 2019 conviction for fighting in a public place was recent and relevant enough to a custodian role - one involving daily public interaction - to justify the decision. It accepted his explanations on older convictions, finding them dismissed, rehabilitated, or too dated to count.
The CRD was not done. It opened a broader probe, alleging the city had a pattern of disqualifying applicants without proper assessments - covering 23 applicants whose records were reviewed the same way.
When the CRD asked for assessment templates and evaluation documents, Torrance refused. An in-house attorney had helped prepare the assessments, the templates contained the attorney’s “conclusions of what the law requires,” and the city claimed privilege.
The trial court ordered production. The appeals court agreed.
Under a 1997 California precedent, an employer that defends itself by pointing to the quality of an investigation done with a lawyer gives up the privilege over that investigation. Torrance told the CRD it complied with the law. It could not then refuse to hand over the paperwork.
The court was direct: the city “cannot demonstrate it complied with section 12952 without putting at issue the adequacy of the individualized assessments.” Without this rule, employers could sidestep the Fair Chance Act by “simply delegating that task wholesale to in-house counsel.”
The ruling does not resolve whether Torrance actually violated the Act. That investigation remains live.
For HR teams in California, the message is practical: looping in counsel on criminal-history hiring decisions does not wall those decisions off from regulatory scrutiny - especially when compliance itself is being questioned.
attorney, and a privilege claim that didn’t survive appeal
