Federal Rules 16 and 26 were amended effective 1 December 2025. The privilege log is now a scheduling question.

Privilege logs used to be something you dealt with after review, in whatever format you had always used, until the other side objected. That changed on 1 December 2025.

Rule 26(f) now requires the discovery plan to include each party’s views and proposals on how and when privilege claims will be made, including the format and the level of detail of any privilege log. Rule 16(b) lets the court adopt those terms in the scheduling order and enforce them. The amendments apply automatically to cases filed on or after that date and may reach pending cases where it is just and practicable.

The practical effect is that the log format is now negotiated at the beginning, written into an order, and enforceable. That is good news if you prepared for it and expensive if you did not.

The formats worth proposing

• Metadata-only logs. Fields pulled straight from the document set — author, recipients, date, document type, privilege asserted — with no hand-drafted description. Fast, cheap, and adequate on large populations where the categories are obvious.
• Categorical logs. Groups of documents logged by category rather than individually. Appropriate where a large volume shares a single clear basis, such as communications with outside counsel during a defined period.
• Document-by-document logs with descriptions. The traditional format, the most defensible, and by far the most expensive. Reserve it for the set where privilege will actually be contested.
• Categorical or metadata-only for the bulk, document-by-document for a defined subset. In practice this is what most well-run matters end up with, and proposing it up front is better than negotiating into it after a motion.

Why the log has to be built during review

A log assembled after review closes is a second pass over the same documents, performed by people reconstructing decisions somebody else made weeks earlier. It is slower, it costs more, and the descriptions are worse because the reviewer who understood the document has moved on.

We build privilege logs as review proceeds, in the format the order specifies, with the privilege call, the basis and the log fields captured at the moment of review on Relativity, RelativityOne or Questa. On a compressed schedule — the Eastern District of Virginia, an ITC investigation, a second request — that is the difference between a routine filing and a motion you lose on timing.

Where generative AI sits in this

AI-assisted privilege review is now common and no court has squarely approved or rejected it. The defensible position today is the one that was always defensible: a documented workflow, human review of the calls that matter, sampling and quality control you can describe, and a record of what the technology did and what a person did. If you cannot explain the process to a magistrate judge, the efficiency is not worth it.

What to do before the conference

Know your population before you propose a format. An early case assessment that tells you how many documents are likely privileged, and how many of those are routine outside-counsel communications, turns the 26(f) conversation from a negotiating position into a scoping exercise.

Pro-Legal Services provides ESI processing, managed document review, AI document review, privilege review and defensible production to law firms and corporate legal departments across Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia. We have been running privilege workflows since 1999, and the rule change made the thing we were already doing into the thing the order requires.

Related: managed document review, AI privilege review, ESI processing, defensible production, eDiscovery services, early case assessment, second request document review, litigation hold services.

Pro-Legal Services, Inc. is an independent litigation support company in Arlington, Virginia, minutes from Washington DC, serving law firms, corporate legal departments and government agencies in DC, Maryland, Virginia and nationwide.

Have a 26(f) conference coming up? Send us the population size and we will give you a log format proposal your data can actually support, with the cost of each option. Pro-Legal Services, Inc. · 1550 Wilson Blvd, Suite 250, Arlington, VA 22209 · 202-955-9400 · info@pro-legal.com