skills/privilege-log-builder/SKILL.md

---
name: privilege-log-builder
description: >-
  Builds and audits privilege or withheld-document logs for litigation,
  arbitration, investigations, and regulatory productions. Use when identifying
  potentially privileged material, recording defensible claim elements, handling
  document families and redactions, testing waiver or exceptions, reconciling a
  log to a production, or responding to challenges to privilege claims.
---

# Privilege Log Builder

Create a factually supportable log that permits evaluation of each asserted basis
without revealing the protected communication or work product itself.

## Intake

Obtain the governing jurisdiction and forum, procedural rules and orders, parties
and client structure, relevant legal advisers and roles, applicable privilege or
protection categories, document population, review decisions, family relationships,
production and redaction data, confidentiality arrangements, clawback terms,
challenge procedure, deadlines, and any categorical-log agreement.

Treat the governing law and required log fields as blocking for a final log. A
draft may proceed with conspicuous placeholders and verification flags.

## Method

1. Identify every potentially applicable protection and its required elements.
   Distinguish legal-advice privilege, litigation or work-product protection,
   without-prejudice material, joint or common-interest arrangements, regulatory
   protections, and confidentiality; do not collapse them into "privileged."
2. Verify the actors, their capacities, client relationship, purpose, recipients,
   confidentiality, legal context, and document date from evidence rather than
   names, domains, titles, or copied lawyers alone.
3. Assign stable document IDs and preserve family, thread, duplicate, near-
   duplicate, attachment, version, redaction, and production relationships.
4. Draft neutral descriptions that explain the general subject and protected
   purpose without revealing advice, strategy, mental impressions, or substance.
5. Record the precise asserted basis, supporting facts, withholding or redaction
   status, confidentiality basis, and reviewer or counsel approval. Separate mixed-
   purpose material and non-privileged attachments where required.
6. Test waiver, broad distribution, third-party presence, forwarding, dominant or
   primary purpose, client identity, advice capacity, in-house counsel role,
   litigation anticipation, crime-fraud or equivalent exceptions, and governing-
   law uncertainty. Flag; do not decide unsupported facts.
7. Apply categorical, metadata-minimal, or exception treatments only where an
   order, agreement, or applicable rule supports them.
8. Reconcile the log to withheld documents, redacted productions, slip sheets,
   numbering, families, and production totals. Identify orphans and inconsistent
   decisions.
9. Prepare challenge responses by linking each disputed entry to its evidence and
   legal elements, while preserving protected content.

## Output

Provide the privilege log, basis-and-elements key, family reconciliation, waiver
and exception flags, inconsistent-treatment report, missing-facts queue, production
reconciliation, challenge-response schedule, and counsel verification checklist.

## Guardrails

Do not state that a document is privileged solely because it is confidential,
created by a lawyer, copied to a lawyer, or labelled privileged. Do not expose the
protected substance in the description. Do not waive, disclose, delete, or alter
material; require qualified counsel to approve final assertions and withdrawals.