In late April, U.S. government lawyers withdrew their opposition to having a special master conduct privilege review of the documents seized from Michael Cohen, the personal lawyer of President Donald Trump. They suggested a new way forward: Technology Assisted Review (TAR) to identify potentially privileged material.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Frank Maas of the Southern District of New York added that he would bring on Canada’s leading Research Professor in TAR, Maura Grossman to assist with the review.

TAR is the latest buzz in e-Discovery circles. The development of technology to assist with managing review, expediting review and reducing its costs varies from predictive coding, concept-clustering and other analytics tools. The potential advantages when using TAR in a privilege review include: speed, accuracy, defensibility, and transparency.

The process selected for use in this case will surely be the talk of the town in the e-Discovery and technology circles, as it has the capacity to open the floodgates for the use of TAR in future cases requiring a privilege review.