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Wednesday, February 17, 2016

The swallows return to Capistrano

The project I am on is primarily a project to draft a privilege log. For those of you who are not attorneys, a privilege log is a document that lists the documents you have withheld because they are protected by the attorney-client privilege or other privileges too complicated and nonsensical to explain. The key here is that you have to provide a description of the document that establishes that the document is privileged without actually revealing what the document says. This actually isn't that hard, unless the document isn't actually privileged and some partner on high has decided that privileged means "I don't want the other guys to see this document because it is embarrassing/sensitive/damaging/fill in the blank of your choice." Yes, this happens.

The other thing that happens as surely as the sun rises in the east is that, at some point in every privilege log project, because of time pressure to finish or whatever, an email will be sent by the powers that be stating that you are no longer allowed to change the privilege call on a document, no matter how unprivileged the document might be, you are simply to find a fucking way to log the document as privileged.

This happens on every single privilege log project, bar none. The email will come down, saying, "Log the fucking document." I cannot reveal privileged communications that have come to me from my superiors on this project. I can, however, say that the rest of this post stands, without correction or modification. Like the return of the swallows to Capistrano, it happens every time.

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