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I understand why you feel that way, but the current policy is not in the direction you are hoping for. The important thing to understand is that all evidence is available by default, that privilege covers the exceptions to that availability. Privilege is construed narrowly, and for now, communications with your advocate, or notes prepared at the request of your advocate, are the sorts of things that are covered. Your own private notes, or chats with your friends about the state of your case, are examples of things that are not covered.

Work product was treated more broadly in one case by a lower magistrate court, but the court making the decision in this case is not bound by that lower court's ruling. What will be interesting is if this ruling gets appealed up to the sups. I doubt the decision will be overruled in any case.

[impossiblefork]

But the actual rule for civil cases (federal rules of civil procedure) is

>(A) Documents and Tangible Things. Ordinarily, a party may not discover documents and tangible things that are prepared in anticipation of litigation or for trial by or for another party or its representative (including the other party's attorney, consultant, surety, indemnitor, insurer, or agent). But, subject to Rule 26(b)(4), those materials may be discovered if:

So the "by or for another party or its representative" seems more like my thinking than the thinking you're describing.

I think considering other statements, Rakoff is certainly wrong. The documents were prepared as part of pretrial preparations. Non-experts need to be able to use search engines, books, etc. and which books someone was handed for their pretrial preparations, or what lookups they have made can't be the business of their opponents. You have an adversarial system. One party can't have access to the pretrial preparations of the other party, it won't lead to fair trials.