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Comment by josefritzishere | Hacker News Reader

Increasingly AI seems to be mostly downside. A legal chat bot without attorney-client privledge, also implies a medical chatbot may have no HIPAA protection. It renders the service unsafe and therefore unusable and maybe more importantly... unsalable.

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This is a court issue, not a technical one. This has so many side effects that weren't thought through (Using Gmail to draft a letter to your attorney, but gmail has enabled AI editing...).

Seems dumb, and like it will cause quite a few issues until it is overturned.

Intent matters, though. Accidentally divulging information you intended to send to your attorney is one thing, but if you are deliberately sending it somewhere else it's something different entirely.

Why would this be overturned? AI is not a lawyer, it can't have attorney-client privilege. In your scenario, you're sending an email to the attorney, not chatting with a chatbot about your case.

They’re saying it’s equivalent to writing a letter to their attorney in an online (Google) doc. Does that Google doc fall under attorney client privilege?

If so, then does a Google doc for your attorney written with Google AI auto enabled have attorney client privilege?

If so, the AI chats for figuring out what you want to say to your attorney would seem to fall under the same category. And so there is either a contradiction or an unintended widening of scope.

Exactly what I was trying to get at. Thanks.

Ah, it sounds like I don't understand how the Google AI works here. I thought it was just some kind of glorified auto-correct or maybe phrase suggestion at best.

Non-lawyer discussing their lawyer's communications with a third party has defeated attorney-client privilege for eons, and that's basically what happened here. Especially when you're sharing those communications with a third party who explicitly told you that they will share those communications with the government if the government asks. There's no reason to overturn this.

Well, calling Claude a "third-party communique" here is the stretch.

Say a person used Excel via Office 365 to run some calculations to be given to their lawyer for their defense. Is that considered to be "communicating with a third party?" I don't think so, it's just a computer tool.

We call them "chatbots" and anthropomorphize LLMs, but, despite the name of Claude's parent company, Claude is not a person.

> Well, calling Claude a "third-party communique" here is the stretch.

Why? The privacy policy explicitly says that when you're using it, you're sending your data to Anthropic.

> Say a person used Excel via Office 365 to run some calculations to be given to their lawyer for their defense. Is that considered to be "communicating with a third party?" I don't think so, it's just a computer tool.

Very possibly, actually. At the very least, I wouldn't assume that it's okay to do that without first consulting with a lawyer. I do know of at least one feature in Office (desktop, not the web version) that prompted lawyers to say "if you don't roll this back, we cannot legally use your product anymore and maintain attorney-client privilege." It depends a lot on the actual contractual agreements in the terms of service and privacy policy, and while I know most people don't read them, those things actually matter!

I'm sure there something in the hundreds of pages of Microsoft o365 about "we may share your data with third-parties" blah blah...

Why are you taking what is clearly a legal problem and making it about the technology? The law could simply grant attorney-client privilege to chatbots. Nobody is arguing the advice was bad or more expensive than a real lawyer.

The obligations placed on lawyers with regards to misrepresentation are a kind of check on the power of attorney-client privilege which would generally not exist for chatbots, so it's not obvious that this would be a good idea.

Because it's the law misunderstanding technology.

Chatbots are not people. They are computer programs. And there's no other realm I can think of where merely interfacing with a computer program breaks attorney-client privilege.

It is equivalent to saying an email to your lawyer breaks privilege because you communicated with gmail. And it gets turbofucked when you consider that a program may be sending your information to an LLM. Would this same judge rule that having copilot installed in Outlook also breaks privilege because they "chatted with an outside party" while drafting an email (even if they didn't intend to send it to copilot)?

I can't think of a reason this isn't about the technology.

I do think we generalize too much, and "merely interfacing with a computer program" is too big a generalization. I could imagine that a videochat with your lawyer is protected because the very definition includes client / lawyer communications, ie., a "video chat with your lawyer" cannot happen without you and your lawyer yet there it is, both interfacing with a videochat program.

A chat with a chatbot never needs a lawyer to be a "chat with a chatbot" lol

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