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. 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. 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.

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