Your AI Chats Can Be Used Against You in Court—Law Firms Are Scrambling

Judge Rakoff ruled those documents could not be shielded for three reasons: Claude is not an attorney, Anthropic's own privacy policy reserves the right to share user data with third parties including government regulators, and Heppner acted independently rather than at his lawyers' direction. No attorney-client relationship "could exist," the judge wrote, "between an AI user and a platform such as Claude."

The ruling landed as a first-of-its-kind written opinion on AI and attorney-client privilege in the United States. It also landed as a wake-up call for a profession that had been quietly watching clients turn to chatbots for legal guidance without considering what happens when those conversations end up in a courtroom.

Rakoff himself left that door open. He noted during the Heppner hearing that had counsel directed the defendant to use Claude, the AI "might arguably be said to have functioned in a manner akin to a highly trained professional who may act as a lawyer's agent within the protection of the attorney-client privilege." That line is now something of a lifeline for firms designing new AI protocols.

The court landscape is not entirely settled. For example, in Warner v. Gilbarco, a court ruled that a self-represented plaintiff's ChatGPT conversations were protected as work product, because AI tools are "tools, not persons" and sharing information with software is not the same as disclosing it to an adversary.

A Colorado court reinforced that logic on March 30 in Morgan v. V2X, also protecting a pro se litigant's AI work product, though it went further by ordering the plaintiff to disclose which AI tool he used and barring confidential discovery materials from being fed into platforms that allow data training.

The pattern is taking shape: If you're a represented party who decided on your own to use a consumer AI chatbot, you're exposed. If you're representing yourself in a civil case, you may have more cover. The difference between those two scenarios is now one of the sharper fault lines in U.S. evidence law.

Justin Ellis of MoloLamken told Reuters that more rulings will eventually clarify when AI chats can be used as evidence. Until then, the legal profession's version of that clarity is showing up in engagement letters and client emails, and in advice that would have seemed strange two years ago: think carefully about what you type into a chatbot, because someone else may read it.

The Los Angeles Superior Court is separately piloting AI tools for judges to handle case summaries and draft rulings—the same technology entering legal workflows from the bench while lawyers scramble to manage it from the client side. Decrypt has also previously covered privacy-focused AI alternatives that avoid centralizing conversation data, a product category whose pitch just got a significant real-world test case.