another point to make it safer would be sharing the "chat" with the lawyer, this way it becomes media of communication.
This guy made the same argument, but as the court detailed, this is a misunderstanding of attorney-client privilege. Sharing an unprivileged conversation with your lawyer doesn't make it privileged. A phone call to your lawyer is privileged, but a phone call to your cousin Jimbo about what you should tell your lawyer is not.
The concept of sharing the chat with the lawyer will not work, since as the ruling points out, you cannot turn a non-privileged document into a privileged one by sharing it with your lawyer after the fact.
I think the principled way of treating this is that it's privileged for the purpose of preparing legal arguments, but not privileged in general. I think this can be supported using the existing law.
Presumably a lawyer's Google searches with terms like "what article is X" etc. are privileged too, since they are used for preparing legal arguments. That it uses AI doesn't suddenly make it communication.
At what point does my typing become communications with my lawyer?
WTF
Surely this is how all async communication with a lawyer works though? Or are gmail drafts privileged if you can make a case that it was going to be sent to your lawyer? Is a letter at your house privileged if you can make a case that it was going to be sent to your lawyer?
It's therefore practically hard to give a useful answer to your questions. There are states and courts that don't recognize drafts as privileged. There are states that do as long as they are created for the purpose of seeking legal advice. There are states in between.
Also keep in mind the main goal of this kind of privilege is to ensure people seek legal advice, and feel comfortable doing so, before they do something that’s going to get them into trouble. it does protect your ability to prepare a defense, and that sort of thing,but if you do a thing after you email your lawyer and the lawyer says "that is a horribly illegal idea", privilege isnt really there to help you, even if that particular email often happens to be privileged. It's there to help society, not keep you from having to pay damages. For example, Companies overuse lawyers in things like clean up after security incidents - very little of that will be actually privileged from discovery no matter how many lawyers got involved.
All that said general advice is to ensure drafts are deleted after being sent.
The only real common thing in this area of law is that the party trying to withhold the document bears the burden of showing it is privileged.
How is it not? I get that a chatbot is not a person with rights. And NAL.
But for all intents and purposes, it is a communication about legal advice. The way a lot of people use it is legal advice. They will continue to use it that way.
So for the law to then turn around and say that it's evidence that will be used against them is kind of messed up. It means confidentiality of your case is bought by paying a lawyer for legal protection, not because you actually need their advice over a chatbot's.
This would fall under the "statement against interest" exception to hearsay, though, because obviously the person who originally said the thing isn't going to want to admit in court that they were committing a crime.
You aren't repeating a fact you heard him say, you are reporting what you heard him say.
If you want to use someone saying something as evidence in court, they need to say it to the court as directly as is practical. If the person saying it isn't going to say it directly to the court, then it needs to be justified with one of the exceptions to the hearsay rule.
In this example, it would be allowed because the person saying it wouldn't be willing to admit to a crime in court.
It would be hearsay if offered as evidence that you had meth in your pocket. It would not if offered in evidence you were enquiring about the legality, to show intent.
I'm not making a blanket statement that that means everything is a carrier, because a good chunk of the page I linked is devoted to endless legal nuances and I defer the details of the concept to those who know better. I'm just saying that the law has a well-established concept for this sort of situation, such that it is not the case that just because a third party is involved instantly all protections dissolve. If you really want to dig into the details, that's something an AI that hits the web and digests things would be pretty good at, as long as you're not planning on legal action based on that. Sometimes the hardest part of learning about something is just finding the term for it that lets you dig in.