Privilege logs were never a fun part of business litigation. There are few tasks more tedious than logging individual pieces of correspondence by date, author, recipients, subject matter, reason withheld, etc.

In the era of electronically stored information, the creation of a document-by-document privilege log has gone beyond mere tedium to become one of the more costly elements of an ESI burden that, by itself, may be dissuading businesses from pursuing commercial litigation at all. Something has to be done, say many, or else the burden of ESI discovery will foreclose litigation as an option for resolving modestly sized disputes. The authors of a recent law review article, building upon the work of The Sedona Conference, think they have a solution.

THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM