Litigation terms
Privilege log
A privilege log is the itemized list a producing party must serve identifying each document withheld from discovery on privilege grounds — with enough detail to let the other side test the claim without revealing the protected content.
When documents are withheld under attorney-client privilege or work-product protection, Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(5) requires the withholding party to describe them “in a manner that… will enable other parties to assess the claim.” The standard log lists each document’s date, author, recipients, general subject, and the privilege asserted.
Why it matters in practice
The privilege log is where privilege fights are won before they’re filed. Reviewing one is pattern work: an in-house lawyer cc’d on routine business email doesn’t privilege it; a “privileged” document later forwarded to a third party may have waived; entries clustered around the key dates in the case deserve the hardest look. Cross-referencing the log against the production’s Bates-stamped ranges is the basic completeness check — documents that appear in neither place are the ones to ask about.
Logging is also a burden the requesting party can weaponize and the producing party can abuse: overbroad “categorical” logs hide the ball, while document-by-document logs of massive email chains are used to run out clocks. Courts increasingly police both.
In the fact record
A withheld document still leaves a shadow — the meeting it scheduled, the decision it preceded, the reply that references it. Because FactMarshal builds its chronology from everything produced, those shadows become visible: gaps and references that point at log entries worth challenging.