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Privilege logging is one of the most time-consuming, expensive, and contentious components of discovery. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(5)(A), which governs the withholding of privileged material, provides little concrete guidance to alleviate these burdens. But the broad language of the rule also offers litigants significant flexibility to incorporate new technology, most notably automation and artificial intelligence, into their privilege logging practices. These tools meaningfully increase efficiency and cost savings for many litigants and should be more widely adopted as the technology progresses.

For years, email has been the dominant form of business communication. The average office worker sends approximately 9,000 to 15,000 emails per year. Multiply 15,000 emails across multiple personnel and multiple years, and that leads to an enormous amount of email flowing into review for a lawsuit or investigation. And, as we all know, many of those emails are replies and forwards containing repetitive information that appear multiple times in our inboxes. Reviewing each individual email in those email chains or “threads” can be time-consuming and costly. Email threading can help solve this problem.

Companies in the midst of government investigations and enforcement actions often must contend with follow-on civil litigation stemming from the same issues. Indeed, due to differing standards of proof, companies that are able to successfully ward off government enforcement actions may still find themselves mired in civil litigation that comes with even more significant discovery and exposure to financial liability.

Recent headlines have been dominated by rapid developments in generative artificial intelligence, and a number of startups are positioning themselves to offer new tools to the legal industry making use of this groundbreaking technology.

The legal world recently learned an important lesson about the blind adoption of generative AI when two New York attorneys were sanctioned for using ChatGPT to write a brief that included entirely fabricated cases.