Crowder v. LinkedIn Corp., No. 22-cv-00237-HSG (LB) (N.D. Cal. Sept. 10, 2026), full opinion (PDF)
A producing party does not get to postpone its privilege log until its privilege review is complete. A magistrate judge in the Northern District of California applied that rule to LinkedIn on September 10. LinkedIn had served more than 6,000 of its roughly 7,000 log entries in one week, twenty-two days before the fact-discovery cutoff. The plaintiffs in the putative antitrust class action against LinkedIn asked the court to find the privilege waived for every document logged late.
The court found real prejudice from the timing, since depositions of the affected custodians were already underway. Nonetheless the court denied the waiver as disproportionate. Instead it ordered in camera review of a sample the plaintiffs will select. The plaintiffs may also reopen a deposition where documents are produced after the witness testified.
What happened
LinkedIn substantially completed its document production at the end of June 2026 but held back custodial documents that needed privilege redactions for later review. It then logged those documents in rolling installments. The first custodial log arrived five weeks after substantial completion. The court's standing order sets the log deadline at fourteen days after responses are due. Only a stipulation or a court order moves that deadline. LinkedIn had obtained neither a stipulation nor an order. LinkedIn answered that its logs tracked its privilege determinations as they were made.
The plaintiffs attacked the content of the logs as well as their timing. They counted more than 400 entries naming only the LinkedIn legal department as the source of legal advice. Thousands of entries carried one of two generic subject descriptions.
The court's analysis
On LinkedIn's theory, the court reasoned, "the withholding party sets its own schedule, and the standing order's fourteen-day default means nothing". The court found that the timing caused real prejudice, because the plaintiffs were deposing custodians whose redactions they could not test.
The court noted that an entry naming only a legal department as the source of advice can suffice where the document itself shows that legal advice was sought or provided. It added that a bare statement that a document reflects legal department advice does not let the requesting party assess the privilege claim. Similar documents can legitimately generate similar entries, the court observed, yet a description covering roughly 3,000 documents must still let the plaintiffs assess each claim. Rather than decide on the parties' characterizations whether LinkedIn's entries met that standard, the court chose to read the documents themselves.
Weighing the delay against the size and difficulty of the review, the court denied a blanket waiver without prejudice. The delay counted against LinkedIn, the court found. Counting for LinkedIn were the size of the production, the document-by-document review of attorney custodians' files, and a dataset reproduced from other litigation with limited metadata. The court also credited LinkedIn's rolling logs once logging began, its prompt amendments, and its production of the specific documents the plaintiffs challenged. A blanket waiver would strip the privilege from thousands of documents, the court reasoned, many of them attorney communications about the agreements at the center of the case. That, in the court's view, would be a needless waste of time and resources rather than a proportionate remedy for late logs. "Denying a wholesale waiver is not a pass", the court added.
Both sides had proposed in camera review. The court adopted that approach with a larger sample than the plaintiffs had offered. The plaintiffs may select up to twenty-five log entries spanning the challenged categories. If the review shows material over-designation, the court will order tailored relief. That relief may include category-wide re-review on a short schedule, targeted findings of waiver, or fee-shifting. Where documents from a custodian's files are de-designated, unredacted, or produced after that custodian's deposition, the plaintiffs may reopen the deposition remotely for up to two hours.
Why it matters
A producing party whose privilege review will run past the log deadline should obtain a stipulation or an order setting a schedule before the deadline passes. Without one, a rolling-log schedule the producing party announces and keeps is still, in this court's view, the party setting its own deadline.
For the requesting party, a blanket waiver is a hard remedy to win against a large production with rolling logs. The realistic remedy is a sample the requesting party chooses. Relief then follows its results. The selection should therefore carry the strongest example of each defect, from entries naming only a legal department to descriptions shared across thousands of documents.
A requesting party prejudiced by late logs should expect the remedy to be a reopened deposition, not a blanket waiver. A party deposing custodians before the logs arrive should record what it could not test and ask for that relief.
The full opinion is available as a PDF.
