Innovative Ways to Approach Privilege Logs

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Listen to the Honorable John Facciola and Meghan O’Donnell, an associate at the Am Law 100 law firm Hunton & Williams LLP and the author of Alternative Privilege Log Techniques in an E-Discovery World tackle the sink hole of time called the Privilege Log.

The Honorable John Facciola is a U.S. Magistrate Judge for the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia. He is well known in the field and his opinions are some of the most widely cited. Some of his best known cases are:

• Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington v. Executive Office of the President,
• Disability Rights Council of Greater Wash. v. Wash. Metro. Area Transit Auth., 2007 WL 1585452 (D.D.C. June 1, 2007)
• United States v. O’Keefe, No. 06-249 (D.D.C. Feb 18, 2008)
• Equity Analytics, LLC v. Lundin, 248 F.R.D. 331 (D.D.C. March 7, 2008), and
• Peskoff v. Faber, 251 F.R.D. 59 (D.D.C. 2008).

Meghan O’Donnell is a second year associate at Hunton & Williams but she has been published by an ABA publication on this topic. It is not often we get panelists to speak on these topics who actually sit in the trenches and talk about what works and what is problematic.

Listen to this frank discussion on the abuses which occur when privilege logs are assembled and the wasted resources. Listen also to some tips on how to improve the process. In this podcast we cover where problems typically occur in privilege reviews, the toll document review of massive amounts of ESI is taking on the profession, quality and cost concerns with manual reviews, how using metadata to construct a privilege log can reduce some of the manual aspects of compiling a privilege log, how the Federal Rules offer support in this process although creating a specific description which judges appreciate might be a challenge, why having a process is so critical in doing a privilege review, to what extent judges will accept using other techniques outside of page by page review to do a privilege review, and why it’s important to get your approach outlined into terms any 12 year old can understand.

Recorded 06/16/2009