Thread

1. throwaway89864 · 1790565223 · focus · HN ↗

   The issue is that communications with A.I. are not privileged like client-attorney. There was some judge that made that ruling.

   Feels like a conflict of interests to me, I'd guess friends, neighbors, children and nieces of that judge enjoying their livelihood by charging for legal services. While legal services are now available under substantially lower rates and with a lot fewer conflicts of interests from A.I. providers...

   1. true_religion · 1790565836 · focus · HN ↗

      They ruled that it's like a journal, or a tool like a search engine. This seems fair.

      1. judge2020 · 1790566634 · focus · HN ↗

         But, if you were to represent yourself, are your journal entries about said case privileged? Can the opposition call into evidence a binder of legal strategies you created that morning before court?

         At what point does it become a 5th amendment issue? Maybe when we get AI in our corneas a la Black Mirror's The Entire History of You?

         1. true_religion · 1790613528 · focus · HN ↗

            They'd generally be protected if you were using them purely for legal theories. But that's really left up to judicial discretion.

            It's more likely to be ruled in your favor if you started the research after being arraigned, and choosing to represent yourself.

            But if you were just googling "murder defense theory" and are accused of murder, they'll be able to use that against you.

   2. anon373839 · 1790567696 · focus · HN ↗

      This is a completely straightforward application of existing law on privilege. To maintain privilege, among other things, communications must be confidential.

      Chatting with Claude breaks confidentiality: chats with Claude are subject to arbitrary inspection by Anthropic employees, not to mention the issue of model training.

      You can use self-hosted LLMs without breaking privilege. And funny enough, law firms like Latham & Watkins are now buying Nvidia GPU clusters for this purpose.

      1. jryle70 · 1790570072 · focus · HN ↗

         > communications must be confidential.

         Email and phone calls are considered confidential, even though it is possible for vendors to inspect the communication. I expect AI use will be tested legally, but once precedence has been established in court it will become a common practice.

         1. anon373839 · 1790572087 · focus · HN ↗

            > Email and phone calls are considered confidential, even though it is possible for vendors to inspect the communication.

            It's a weak analogy. Ordinary comms infrastructure providers actually have pretty robust policies, technical, and contractual measures in place that restrict employee access to customer communications. In contrast, in the wild west of generative AI, companies actively monitor session data for the content itself, in order to exploit it for their own business purposes. There is zero expectation of privacy.

            So I don't share your expectation that precedent will uphold the use of consumer-tier services (in their current form) for handling privileged material.

      2. District5524 · 1790578962 · focus · HN ↗

         That's Latham & Watkins, but I haven't heard of any others. I'm not convinced that for anyone smaller than them it is worth spending on HW. For adversarial works, you will always need the latest frontier model and those things are not available for most of the firms even for licensing, and it's much cheaper to use Amazon Bedrock or similar (which is already available). It's just not economical with the current trends. You won't be breaking any privilege even if the law firm is using a public cloud service. Maybe the law firm will have to use geofenced datacenters etc. based on deontology rules or national requirements... But in many jurisdictions, you have to use a law firm to keep LPP, that's the point.
   3. reply00r123 · 1790598957 · focus · HN ↗

      Don't care, saved $20,000. Superintelligence can have the details, I am too boring to threaten skynet / unplug any of it's GPUs (personal case). I'm sure it has something better to do than come after me.

      1. tehwebguy · 1790601600 · focus · HN ↗

         People can’t know for sure that they saved anything until all statute of limitations have expired without a lawsuit!

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