No equivalent of the common law concepts of legal advice privilege/attorney-client privilege and litigation privilege/attorney work product doctrine exists in Taiwan.

In Taiwan, both legislation and case law are silent as to whether a client has the right to refuse to disclose, or prevent any other person from disclosing, confidential communications between the client and their lawyers. However, relevant laws and regulations impose obligations upon and grant certain rights to lawyers with respect to client confidentiality. There are three key sources of obligations upon lawyers:

• Under the Lawyer Ethics Rules, lawyers must keep confidential the content of the matter for which they are engaged, and must not disclose such content to any third party unless the client's intention or plan is of a criminal nature or the criminal behavior of the client may endanger the life of any third party. A lawyer who violates the code of ethics will be disciplined in accordance with the Attorney Regulation Act as amended on 15 January 2020.
• Under the Criminal Code, lawyers who disclose confidential information without a legitimate reason may be imprisoned for up to one year. Alternatively, they may be detained, or a fine of up to TWD 50,000 may be imposed.
• Under the Code of Criminal Procedures, lawyers may refuse to testify as a witness in a criminal proceeding if their testimony would disclose their client's confidential information, unless the lawyer is permitted to disclose such information by the client. This right is only granted to lawyers. Clients have no legal basis for requiring their lawyers to refuse to testify if their lawyers wish to do so.

In relation to criminal cases, an opinion issued by the Department of Justice provides that the work product of a lawyer and relevant correspondence between a lawyer and their client cannot be seized by prosecutors. However, the relevant laws and court judgments are silent on whether documents that include confessions made by a defendant to their lawyer can be used as evidence in court. In practice, there have been cases where prosecutors not only seized correspondence between the lawyers and the client when conducting a search, but also used these documents in court proceedings. Although the courts have not explicitly referred to such materials as evidence in these cases, the fact that the court did not exclude seized client-attorney correspondence suggests that it may be possible to use client-attorney correspondence as evidence against a defendant.

In civil cases, lawyers may refuse to testify or provide documentation in their possession if the content of such testimony or documentation is confidential to their professional duties or business, and the lawyer cannot testify without divulging their technical or professional secrets. As under Taiwan law, there is no discovery procedure in the common law sense, the production of documents that in other jurisdictions would normally be considered privileged will not generally be an issue in Taiwan.