Citation for #1 - https://harvardlawreview.org/blog/2026/03/united-states-v-he...

> Judge Rakoff of the Southern District of New York — addressing “a question of first impression nationwide” — ruled that written exchanges between a criminal defendant and generative AI platform Claude were not protected by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine.

Much more to it than this one-liner that I pulled out, but safe to say, don't rely on or put your legal defense etc. (or elements of it) into AI unless you want it discovered.

(not a lawyer, unlike OP, who might be able to refine what I highlighted with more precision)

For (1) it's so wild to me that if I pay a lawyer, they can run the same queries on these tools and they are protected by attorney-client privilege, but if I do it to help me prepare my defense, then the exact same queries would be subject to subpoena/discovery.

Does anyone know if there exists any OPSEC procedure for me to use third party tools like this for my own concerning legal questions that is both ethical and allows me to be confident that my interactions won't land in discovery documents?

#1 is a little complicated. Communications with an AI are possibly sometimes protected by work-product doctrine... but only if you're representing yourself as a pro se litigant, and strictly limited to mental impressions and opinion work product of counsel (in this case, extended to the pro se litigant). See: Warner v. Gilbarco, Inc.

There's a good summary of the current state of things here: https://www.akerman.com/en/perspectives/ai-privilege-and-wor...

Also worth noting that none of this is binding precedent, so expect this field to evolve over time.

For #2, I’d expect you’d use this through an organization/business account that has data retention turned off by default.

Can’t #1 be solved with the stroke of a pen? “Legal queries to LLMs shall be subject to the same attorney-client privilege”

On (1), what if the law firm hosts the AI chat?

It seems like local AI could be valuable for law firms for reasons of (2) as well

Slightly related: Amazon’s bedrock has better privacy guarantees. This seems to be skills that can be added to Desktop app, which can connect to Bedrock for inference.

Wonder if people who decide to represent themselves would be allowed to use this service “live” on the courtroom. Usually people who represent themselves fall flat because they don’t know when it’s appropriate to invoke what and at time appear to putting legal words together that don’t make sense in a given context. This would certainly help these people, if allowed, and they don’t go off the rails.

Seems like a good use case for a locally deployed LLM though that's annoying and expensive to maintain sophisticated one like deepseek.

what if either user uses these skills with offline weights? should help with 2), at least right?

In the legal world are there certifications for handling privileged information?

For example in the medical world if you are a provider covered by HIPAA you must have a signed "Business Associate Agreement" with any party that handles the covered protected health information (PHI).

Also in all seriousness, can we actually trust that setting? I might be paranoid, but that doesn't mean that the whole world hasn't broken my trust...

It’s a bit of a moot point because the amount of times that your AI logs are going to be subpoenaed in your court case approaches zero.

> As a lawyer, I'm excited about this,

As in "I'm excited to win a lot of money dismantling hallucinated quotations and invalid assumptions"?

The user should be, user gets info from an LLM, a machine or a web post, it doesn't change anything, the one submitting the documents is the one responsible imo and it should remain that way.

> Who's accountable when it does something wrong? Surely Anthropic Inc won't take the fall for you.

Us lawyers. Using AI isn't a binary decision. Your attorneys can use AI to be more efficient, and you can use AI to better understand what's going on, what your lawyers are telling you, or to learn what questions to ask. Or you can use it in lower-stakes situations where nobody is going to pay for a lawyer.

I'm cautiously optimistic about AI for legal work. So much of legal work can be drudgery, mucking through documents, etc. There's a lot of room to apply LLMs even just for the kind of tasks we know they can do. But I think the Claude approach using agents is the way to go for legal work. LLM context windows are far too small to hold the documents for even a small case. So you have to use it the way programmers use it: to work on a file structure, saving state in .md files, etc. That approach is well developed for programming, but the legal AI companies haven't even scratched the surface of it. (And frankly, the products they have put together, which hide the LLM behind some sort of interface, aren't very good.)

Unfortunately, I think the example you mentioned (helping individuals defend against suits at lower cost) is where AIs won't help much. A lot of that work is people work. Something happened. Then you gotta talk to everyone it happened to, sort through conflicting stories, hopefully work out a deal, if not, try to persuade a judge in court, etc. AI unfortunately is more applicable to allowing big companies to throw more papers at each other in big lawsuits while controlling legal spend.

> The legal system will not look fondly upon this stuff

True, but the legal system didn't look fondly on outlawing jaywalking, until it did. Took it about 20 years in the US.

FTA:

> The attorney using the plugin — not the plugin, and not Anthropic — is responsible for the legal positions taken in their work product.

Claude for Legal: Your #1 AI Agent for getting fined and referred to the bar over filing non-existent citations.

No different than when googling and a website is wrong

Is the library responsible for some mistake you make based on the research you do from there?

No. If you talk to an attorney and they take reasonable precautions to maintain the integrity of the confidential attorney client relationship, the privilege is preserved. If not, not preserved.

[flagged]

> at partner request

Curious if Thomson Reuters (Westlaw) felt threatened if they were this compelled to moan about it. All it does is make me wonder how well these skills perform when paired with Lexis (if possible?) instead of Westlaw.

Can't we just use the version of the codebase from before that change?

It's like asking what if AWS starts doing it, they have all the infrastructure in place. LLMs are just one cog. There is a lot on the application side they are not doing at all.

Every valuation in the AI space is iffy. Nobody actually has a solid business plan, only vibes, but that isn't stopping people from throwing money at them.

> Does it mean this is based on customer's sessions?

Yes

> Are they entitled to build knowledge bases for every profession, topic and workflow in the world using customer data?

They certainly believe they are and they’re quite open about it.

It even has a name, Clio. Per their page it’s a “system for privacy-preserving insights into real-world AI use”

Here’s their page on it: https://www.anthropic.com/research/clio

Yes they are training on your business's data so that their AI can replace your business later. If you don't believe it, name one thing they didn't train on.

And in what country? They know that the law is different in every country right?

"Are (legally and morally) entitled" vs "act as if they are entitled"... yes, a big question.

> I guess at some point we will have lawyers, attorneys and judges using this stuff

We are already well beyond this point. Look already at the number of cases around the world where lawyers have provided documents to the court with hallucinated case citations.

Almost makes me want to get a law degree.

I mean, the laws are written down somewhere though. A human can still look at the actual law and surmise that the AI is feeding them bullshit.

the look on the face of the Court administrator upon hearing someone describe the "paperclip maximizer" problem.. ominous!

I don't think they will ever stop screwing around in this field because lawyers are expensive, which means the potential gains from switching to AI are high. However, people seem to think the AI companies will be offering legal advice directly, as competitors to lawyers. I can't see them ever doing that, it would be too much of a liability minefield. Instead they want to offer these AI services to law firms, who will then use them in the provision of their own legal services. For better or worse, this is happening, and pretty much all of the bigger corporate law firms are now using AI in some way or another (and clients are demanding it). We will certainly continue to see issues caused by the use of AI in law, but that will be on the lawyers.

I mean if they aren't going to be forced to eat the liability then the hype they get from it is worth it. Not a great state of affairs...

The biggest issue in the real estate world is dealing with local state, county, and municipality governments and each one's unique ordinances, etc. While I think LLMs will be great at pulling data from a variety of disparate sources (ie, records databases), or even automating interacting with them, they are not going to be great at solving the problem whose solution is "this is the person in the county court clerks office you need to talk to."

I’d guess they have some kind of analytics telling them what kind of questions are being asked.

It seems to me that heavily gate kept professions/knowledge will go first. As those tend to be extensive opinions to get.

It would be silly to assume they're not making a real estate product, lol.

Your lawyer uses cloud software, this is no different.

I must believe, as with the medical profession's uptake of AI tools, if these tools prove themselves to be reliable and meaningfully helpful, she will experience more than enough professional influence to learn the tools.

Fake verticals created for no other purpose than to pad out a page in the IPO prospectus. That is literally their purpose, there is no technical or business content here worth discussing, but HackerNews is so pilled it can't help but discuss. Maybe after the 100th "Claude for dog walkers" announcement we'll catch on.

There's going to be a "Claude for wiping my ass" at this rate.

It's like that short animation of a Kiwi bird getting high[1].

Each cycle gets shorter and shorter to sustain the high.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUngLgGRJpo

Lawyer here:

Harvey was never very good, or useful. It mostly exists so large law firms can say they do AI. AFAICT. I hope it dies and something useful takes over, but i doubt it :)

Keep in mind harvey starts at like 50-100k, and is well out of the cost range of the vast majority of law firms.

This will help random people dealing with small claims, people cosplaying lawyers to avoid costs, etc.

It will have no effect on the legal startups that are actually good (Eve, et al), because what this stuff does is nowhere close to what most lawyers outside of commercial contract legal counsel spend their time on. I considered doing some AI legal consulting/startups myself, and so have spent tons of time literally sitting down with lawyers in various areas outside of my own and seeing where they spend their time for real.

Let's take one area: personal injury attorneys who aren't in the volume game (which is owned by a fairly small number of large national firms) spend lots of time on case valuation, getting data, and exhibit prep.

None of this is going to help deal with getting missing medical records from places that require that you literally fax random stuff to them, and then call to followup 18 times. I wish i was kidding. Even getting electronic medical records is still a serious pain in the ass, human wise.

Or analyze the past 1000 cases you have (100-1000 documents per case), including what county, what opposing lawyer, counsel, plus the 1000 documents in this case, and give you a sense of how valuable this case is or not.

Or if you are a family lawyer, actually mediating a divorce.

Things like this are what actually useful specialized AI legal products do or at least help with.

Claude is very far away from being able to handle most of these things. It is a jack of all trades tool. Will it be able to do this someday? Maybe.

Additionally, keep in mind most legal startups i've run into are based on caricatures of what lawyers do (IE startups who think that most personal injury lawyers are running around after auto cases and trying to be high volume, etc).

Any lawyer who has deal with legal startups could very quickly tell you which will make it or not, because it's pretty consistent which solve real problems that will be hard to commoditize through things like claude for legal.

Same as it compared against "Build your website without any code" startups 2 months ago. Now they are dropping like flies.

A life of every thin wrapper company will be the same. Anthropic/OpenAI will just cut the middle-man as soon as they see potential.

Investors in Harvey and Legora are both in for a rude shock.

It's already doing wonders for small time businesses and individuals that municipalities think they're free to jerk around because the size of the screwing they're trying to dish out isn't worth hiring a lawyer and/or fighting through court over.

I would love this for poor people to fight giant corporations via 'lawfare'. It's largely unethical (just like many corporations) but just knowing how to file junk lawsuits that cost corporations millions to fight would be nice.

I dont mean 'frivolous' like prisoners who file pro-se about their ice cream melting [1], but a level or two above that , that costs time and money to produce records and testimony to defend, even if nary a dime is paid out. Basically ask GPT to figure out the terms and theories to file to get your lawsuit accepted, and done by poor people who cannot afford to post $ or repay if they lose. aka "asymmetric warfare" that benefits the little guy, just like the kind private equity or other terrible corporations wield against the poor via"mandatory arbitration" clauses or damages caps and similar rules that always benefit corporations.

1. https://www.deseret.com/1994/3/21/19098386/melted-ice-cream-...

>Imagine the shenanigans someone can achieve with that user.

First step out of line and that account along with anything remotely connected will be banned to oblivion.

Given they share models on Azure, Anthropic will have someone at Microsoft on speed dial.

I've even seen disconnected commit hashes disappear during their security responses which the repo owner has no way of removing.

One would think that they could spontaneously offer him a hundred million dollars for it and solve the problem.

I half-suspect they threatened him and he stuck to his guns.

It made me double check if it was a fake repo.

Good. Harvey was never actually good.

Harvey was always an upstart in the legal tech industry. There's other companies that have a much better understanding of the market and compliance issues but you don't hear about them because nobody wants to talk about legal tech.

It's their repo

Who? There are several space wankers but I don't know of any tied to Anthropic.