Protecting privilege continues to drive up costs in litigation and government investigations. The explosion in electronically-stored information has made matters worse by generating exponentially more documents to review and log as privileged. Unfortunately, the relief Congress sought to provide more than five years ago through the adoption of Federal Rule of Evidence 502 has not been realized to the degree intended. This is largely because many litigants and their counsel surprisingly still are not aware of the rule’s protections and many others are not yet comfortable taking advantage of those protections. But as clients continue to look for ways to trim litigation spending, privilege-related costs present low-hanging fruit. In the “Data Law Trends & Developments: E-Discovery, Privacy, Cybersecurity & Information Governance”, at page 34, I address some of the ways litigants can significantly cut these costs without unreasonably risking waiver. This includes such mechanisms as non-waiver orders (under Rule 502(d) in federal court), which can allow production of documents with limited or even no privilege review at all; technology-assisted review, which can identify potentially privileged documents in an intended production without full-scale manual review; and electronically-generated privilege logs using metadata, which avoids the tedious and extremely costly effort of manually-prepared logs. I predict that these and other novel mechanisms will grow in popularity and acceptance as litigants and the courts continue to look for ways to rein in rising costs. I hope you enjoy the report and welcome your feedback.