New E-Discovery Rules & The Attorney-Client Privilege: A Middle Ground for Waiver?

A November 2006 article by Preston Gates partner Julie Anne Halter for the Washington Legal Foundation:

"The proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure will go into  effect on December 1, 2006, absent some affirmative act by Congress to prevent their  adoption. Among the amendments are provisions designed to address the everapparent  problem faced by corporate litigants: the volume of electronically stored  information and the varying ways it is maintained make it very difficult and often  cost-prohibitive to efficiently and effectively review it for privileged material prior to production. Under the current legal framework, the inadvertent production of  privileged or work-product protected material creates substantial risk; at the same  time, the effort and cost to conduct a comprehensive pre-production privilege review  often make such review impractical."

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