Attorney-Client Privilege

A legal doctrine protecting confidential communications between a lawyer and client from compelled disclosure — and one of the easiest privileges to inadvertently waive.

In depth

Attorney-client privilege protects confidential communications between a lawyer and client made for the purpose of seeking or providing legal advice. The privilege is the client's, not the lawyer's, and is one of the oldest doctrines in common-law systems. Critically for AI users, the privilege can be waived — including by voluntarily disclosing the communication to a third party. Whether pasting a privileged document into a generative AI service constitutes such a disclosure is a developing legal question, and federal courts have begun to address it directly. Even where waiver is uncertain, the prudent posture is not to disclose privileged material to systems whose contents the client cannot control.

Examples

  • A litigator pasting a draft brief that contains privileged client analysis into ChatGPT to get redline suggestions.
  • An associate using a coding assistant to refactor a privileged spreadsheet of case strategy notes.
  • A paralegal asking an AI tool to summarise privileged email correspondence with the client.

How Locke handles attorney-client privilege

Locke's Legal industry profile detects patterns associated with privileged material — case numbers, witness identifiers, privilege headers, work-product references. Detection happens locally; nothing leaves the device, which means the act of running Locke itself does not implicate waiver.

See the product

Reading on this topic