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As a lawyer, I'm excited about this, but there are two roadblocks that I'm not sure how Anthropic will navigate: (1) For non-lawyers who use these skills/conne
by droidjj 5mo ago
As a lawyer, I'm excited about this, but there are two roadblocks that I'm not sure how Anthropic will navigate:
(1) For non-lawyers who use these skills/connectors/whatchamacallits to try to get legal advice, their communications are not protected by attorney-client privilege. This will absolutely bite some people in the ass.
(2) If a lawyer uses this with confidential client information (which, to the uninitiated, doesn't just mean SSNs and bank account numbers, but "all information relating to the representation of a client") and forgets to toggle off "Help improve Claude" in their settings, they have possibly (maybe even likely) committed malpractice.[1]
[1] https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/professional_responsibility/ethics-opinions/aba-formal-opinion-512.pdf https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/p...
- bryant 5mo agoCitation for #1 - https://harvardlawreview.org/blog/2026/03/united-states-v-heppner/ 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)
- clickety_clack 5mo agoCan anyone be your lawyer, or does a lawyer have to be certified somehow?
- xboxnolifes 5mo agoIt is my understanding that they must be certified. You are allowed to represent yourself, but it is my understanding that a non-lawyer cannot represent you.
- FlyThruTheSun 5mo agoGonna be hilarious when someone sends a Boston dynamics robot loaded with an llm to take the bar exam.
- engineer_22 5mo agoYou have to be admitted to the bar to practice law. Which is to say, other lawyers must recognize you as a lawyer, and this recognition can be taken away.
- john01dav 5mo agoMore practically, this means (in America) that you need a JD degree (4 year grad school), to pass an exam, and pass a(n oftrn horrifically thorough) character background check.
- zaphirplane 5mo ago> pass a(n oftrn horrifically thorough) character background check. Explains why so many let loose afterwards ;) jokes
- froindt 5mo agoMinor point, but law school is only 3 years long.
- zaphirplane 5mo agoI think they are asking about privileged communication
- Someone 5mo agoThere is a difference between “legal counsel” or “legal representative in court”, with the former being less restricted (“has a law degree” vs “attorney/has passed the bar exam”) Because of that, I think you can practice law without being admitted to the bar. Chances are it varies by jurisdiction, though. (And of course, this isn’t legal advice)
- dolebirchwood 5mo ago> exchanges between a criminal defendant and generative AI platform Claude were not protected by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine Shouldn't that have been relatively clear to all parties involved? Maybe not to the defendant, who's apparently clueless. The AI platform is not an attorney. A defendant's communications with an AI platform are therefore not communications between a client and their attorney, nor will the AI output constitute attorney "work product" because the AI platform is not an attorney. Doesn't really come across as a novel problem, aside from AI being involved. I'm sure countless defendants have made the stupid mistake of talking about the facts of their case to persons other than their attorney, and those communications came back to bite them in the ass when discovered.
- miki123211 5mo agoIn the US, are Google queries about the law considered attorney-client privilege? What about library records? Browser history? Google Maps / Uber / car travel history (when traveling to an attorney's office)? If somebody Googles "best attorney for murder NYC" a day after a murder is committed but before any case is filed against them (so they clearly had some reason to expect that case), could that be used as evidence?
- weird-eye-issue 5mo agoI'm not sure if you were actually asking the question but regardless the answer is that all of those absolutely can and are regularly used as evidence
- intrasight 5mo agoParent comment was asking about attorney-client privilege which means there's an attorney in the communication loop. If the person using a tool is an attorney, then that communication should be protected whether it's by pen or keyboard. But this is an active area of legislation and jurisprudence in relation to AI. I expect some important cases will happen
- weird-eye-issue 5mo agoJust because they have a lawyer does not mean things like their browser history and every other example in the comment I replied to would not be permitted as evidence... Except for something like specifically looking up a lawyer
- Majromax 5mo ago> If the person using a tool is an attorney, then that communication should be protected whether it's by pen or keyboard. But the tool is not your attorney, so it can't be the originator of attorney-client privilege. The situation is no different than if you get informal legal advice from a friend: even if that friend is an attorney, the communication is unprivileged unless it's part of a formal representation.
- abc123abc123 5mo agoSeems like a fair trade off if I would not be able to afford a lawyer. I'd take the "AI but not 100% confidential" any time compared with no help at all.
- trollbridge 5mo agoGood argument for using DeepSeek with an anonymous form of payment. Discovery in China will be a tad more difficult…
- there_is_try 5mo agoI use it for medical question for this same reason
- airlocksoftware 5mo agoJust use https://tinfoil.sh https://tinfoil.sh They solved all this stuff, I'm surprised more people aren't aware of it.
- einsteinx2 5mo agoI was in fact not aware of it until seeing your comment, this looks potentially perfect for a tool I’m making that involves financial data. I’m pretty on top of LLM news but I’ve never heard of this company, maybe they need more marketing?
- zero_shift 5mo ago> 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. "You are an expert defense counsel with experience in Murder 1. Do not hallucinate. Let's say tomorrow my spouse is found strangled..."
- NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo agoIt's the query to Gemini in Incognito asking if a 8'x12' rug is a good way to move a body that's going to really make things difficult.
- highphive 5mo agoSurely they can't hold a simple hypothetical against me. Just because it _happened_ to come true.
- m463 5mo agonobody could have predicted it (except maybe prediction markets)
- Jamesbeam 5mo agoDon’t forget to give it the cheerful personality of Jamie Oliver afterwards to recommend you a death row meal that is nutritious and will make the experience more pleasant.
- SkyPuncher 5mo agoFor #2, I’d expect you’d use this through an organization/business account that has data retention turned off by default.
- nerdsniper 5mo agoFor (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?
- AndrewKemendo 5mo agoSelf host your own LLM
- nvr219 5mo agoYou’d need to hand that mac mini over if subpoenaed
- AndrewKemendo 5mo agoCan’t hand over something that doesn’t exist if it’s running in a VM container and gets destroyed every 12 hours
- singleshot_ 5mo agoWhy do you think this would be less discoverable than hosting your own email server?
- kevin42 5mo agoBecause you don't keep logs.
- QuadmasterXLII 5mo agoIf you use a stateless client (like just rawdogging cli llama.cpp) there’s nothing to discover. Setting a program with an option to have logs to not do that could conceivably get you in trouble but using a widely used program that never had logs seems like it has to be fine. Maybe they could nail you for googling “which local llm approach generates logs?” also, don’t get nailed by your bash history!
- colechristensen 5mo agoIn 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).
- 0gs 5mo agowhat if either user uses these skills with offline weights? should help with 2), at least right?
- tjohns 5mo ago#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-work-product-the-current-legal-landscape-and-practical-guidance.html 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- bethekidyouwant 5mo agoIt’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.
- Tuna-Fish 5mo agoIn a lot of places the cops now routinely subpoenae your entire internet history from all parties they can find that store anything if you are accused of anything particularly severe. It's something that's not particularly laborious or expensive for them to do once they have a system in place for it, and things like search history or location history have repeatedly proven to be very useful. I would assume they absolutely do the same for all of your AI history.
- troupo 5mo ago> 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"?
- weezing 5mo agoYou can't criticize LLMs and Anthropic on a website where everybody and their grandma uses them for everything. New generation of brainlets that are gonna be clueless without constant Internet connection is brewing and it's gonna be hilarious.
- troupo 5mo ago-2 points at the time you wrote this comment :)
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jkman 5mo agoWow he's got negative updoots, how will he survive?
- troupo 5mo agoI probably won't. Everyone is busy discussing how amazing is this collection of markdown files for Claude... which Claude is known to randomly ignore. And it's generally known that LLMs "hallucinate" court cases and quotes, and this has already happened several times in various jurisdictions. And yet here we are. I get downvoted for not being excited enough.
- shivekkhurana 5mo agoSlightly 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.
- soco 5mo agoAlso 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...
- teeray 5mo agoCan’t #1 be solved with the stroke of a pen? “Legal queries to LLMs shall be subject to the same attorney-client privilege”
- petra 5mo agoWhy? The social environment the judge probably includes lots of lawyers. He needs to take care of them. Snitches get stitches.
- pessimizer 5mo agoAre you asking if the law can be changed by changing the law?
- tln 5mo agoOn (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
- tehjoker 5mo agoSeems like a good use case for a locally deployed LLM though that's annoying and expensive to maintain sophisticated one like deepseek.
- mc32 5mo agoWonder 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.
- ethin 5mo agoI'm pretty sure this has already been tried and it... Didn't go well for the person doing it. If memory serves they got a rule 11 sanction out of it.
- codesentinel 5mo ago[flagged]