As a lawyer, I'm excited about this, but there are two roadblocks that I'm not sure how Anthropic will navigate:
(1) For non-lawyers who use these skills/connectors/whatchamacallits to try to get legal advice, their communications are not protected by attorney-client privilege. This will absolutely bite some people in the ass.
(2) If a lawyer uses this with confidential client information (which, to the uninitiated, doesn't just mean SSNs and bank account numbers, but "all information relating to the representation of a client") and forgets to toggle off "Help improve Claude" in their settings, they have possibly (maybe even likely) committed malpractice.[1]
> Judge Rakoff of the Southern District of New York — addressing “a question of first impression nationwide” — ruled that written exchanges between a criminal defendant and generative AI platform Claude were not protected by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine.
Much more to it than this one-liner that I pulled out, but safe to say, don't rely on or put your legal defense etc. (or elements of it) into AI unless you want it discovered.
(not a lawyer, unlike OP, who might be able to refine what I highlighted with more precision)
> Much more to it than this one-liner that I pulled out, but safe to say, don't rely on or put your legal defense etc. (or elements of it) into AI unless you want it discovered.
"You are an expert defense counsel with experience in Murder 1. Do not hallucinate. Let's say tomorrow my spouse is found strangled..."
In the US, are Google queries about the law considered attorney-client privilege? What about library records? Browser history? Google Maps / Uber / car travel history (when traveling to an attorney's office)?
If somebody Googles "best attorney for murder NYC" a day after a murder is committed but before any case is filed against them (so they clearly had some reason to expect that case), could that be used as evidence?
Parent comment was asking about attorney-client privilege which means there's an attorney in the communication loop. If the person using a tool is an attorney, then that communication should be protected whether it's by pen or keyboard. But this is an active area of legislation and jurisprudence in relation to AI. I expect some important cases will happen
Just because they have a lawyer does not mean things like their browser history and every other example in the comment I replied to would not be permitted as evidence...
Except for something like specifically looking up a lawyer
Generally seeking counsel for a crime you may end up being accused of isn't going to be admissible as evidence. The "if he's so innocent, why did he hire an attorney" isn't something that judges tend to allow to play out in a courtroom.
Seems like a fair trade off if I would not be able to afford a lawyer. I'd take the "AI but not 100% confidential" any time compared with no help at all.
> exchanges between a criminal defendant and generative AI platform Claude were not protected by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine
Shouldn't that have been relatively clear to all parties involved? Maybe not to the defendant, who's apparently clueless.
The AI platform is not an attorney. A defendant's communications with an AI platform are therefore not communications between a client and their attorney, nor will the AI output constitute attorney "work product" because the AI platform is not an attorney.
Doesn't really come across as a novel problem, aside from AI being involved. I'm sure countless defendants have made the stupid mistake of talking about the facts of their case to persons other than their attorney, and those communications came back to bite them in the ass when discovered.
It is my understanding that they must be certified. You are allowed to represent yourself, but it is my understanding that a non-lawyer cannot represent you.
You have to be admitted to the bar to practice law. Which is to say, other lawyers must recognize you as a lawyer, and this recognition can be taken away.
More practically, this means (in America) that you need a JD degree (4 year grad school), to pass an exam, and pass a(n oftrn horrifically thorough) character background check.
For (1) it's so wild to me that if I pay a lawyer, they can run the same queries on these tools and they are protected by attorney-client privilege, but if I do it to help me prepare my defense, then the exact same queries would be subject to subpoena/discovery.
Does anyone know if there exists any OPSEC procedure for me to use third party tools like this for my own concerning legal questions that is both ethical and allows me to be confident that my interactions won't land in discovery documents?
If you are preparing for your own defense and don't have an attorney (you're acting pro se), your own LLM use would likely be protected under work product doctrine. The court would extend you some of the same protections an attorney would have, for the limited purposes of preparing your case.
This is a very narrow exemption, however.
(You would also want to make sure you're using a paid AI plan with contractually guaranteed privacy protections, otherwise it could be construed as third-party communications, which implicitly waives privilege.)
So not familiar with the caselaw around work product, but if you use an API tool directly and not the different chat tools, the queries are not permanently cached for anyone to give up in the end.
So basically if you use any of the CLI tools, there is nothing for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. to give the courts.
Online ChatGPT (especially the free version), are apparently cached by OpenAI on their servers. (I am not sure if Claude Desktop caches the conversations locally or in the cloud as well, read the fine print if it matters!)
interesting angle - how are/would compressed context (i.e. the parts of the user-LLM transcription likely to be saved) be treated by the courts? Would this be considered hearsay?
> Does anyone know if there exists any OPSEC procedure for me to use third party tools like this for my own concerning legal questions that is both ethical and allows me to be confident that my interactions won't land in discovery documents?
Isn't that a fundamental misunderstanding? Would "OPSEC" like that amount to destruction of evidence or contempt of court or something like that?
Like if all your incriminating documents are on some encrypted drive, it's not like that defeats discovery. You're supposed to decrypt them and hand them over.
Your only practical defence is to set up a local LLM that destroys records in a predictable way (immediately, on a time table and so forth) and then ensure however you access that doesn’t leave any traces either.
And then you need to consistently use this for purposes other than crime.
Discovery in a criminal trial is more limited than in a civil trial.
Your only real defense against discovery is to not have said it, or to have destroyed all records of it before the hint of discovery wafted on the wind.
Yes? Which makes it feel like the answer is just “No.” Unless you use Mullvad, TailsOS, and don’t log into the service. But I’m not sure if that’s “ethical” for Google/DDG searches and it’s not really possible for Claude/Kagi. I would assume that simply using a “secret” account isn't a magic way to avoid discovery either.
>For (1) it's so wild to me that if I pay a lawyer, they can run the same queries on these tools and they are protected by attorney-client privilege, but if I do it to help me prepare my defense, then the exact same queries would be subject to subpoena/discovery.
How's this any different than any professional license? You're basically paying for preferential treatment from the state in a given subject area.
> How's this any different than any professional license? You're basically paying for preferential treatment from the state in a given subject area.
Because it's got nothing to do with the professional part? Licensing should affect their practice of law, sure, but it shouldn't grant random other privileges.
If you use a stateless client (like just rawdogging cli llama.cpp) there’s nothing to discover. Setting a program with an option to have logs to not do that could conceivably get you in trouble but using a widely used program that never had logs seems like it has to be fine. Maybe they could nail you for googling “which local llm approach generates logs?” also, don’t get nailed by your bash history!
#1 is a little complicated. Communications with an AI are possibly sometimes protected by work-product doctrine... but only if you're representing yourself as a pro se litigant, and strictly limited to mental impressions and opinion work product of counsel (in this case, extended to the pro se litigant). See: Warner v. Gilbarco, Inc.
Slightly related:
Amazon’s bedrock has better privacy guarantees. This seems to be skills that can be added to Desktop app, which can connect to Bedrock for inference.
In the legal world are there certifications for handling privileged information?
For example in the medical world if you are a provider covered by HIPAA you must have a signed "Business Associate Agreement" with any party that handles the covered protected health information (PHI).
You can't criticize LLMs and Anthropic on a website where everybody and their grandma uses them for everything. New generation of brainlets that are gonna be clueless without constant Internet connection is brewing and it's gonna be hilarious.
I wonder why there isn't much for real estate in this package.
Are they perhaps working on a totally different real estate project. I am in that space and very nervous about it getting wiped out by anthropic or openAI.
To be honest, I am not sure why they still haven't make a big play for that industry.
Just remember that your AI chat history is not protected like attorney client privilege and can be used as evidence against you in court. If you talk to a lawyer and they use AI, those chats are privileged.
No. If you talk to an attorney and they take reasonable precautions to maintain the integrity of the confidential attorney client relationship, the privilege is preserved. If not, not preserved.
I don’t understand this situation .. where in your court case the prosecutor asks a judge to get a warrant for your AI chat logs … this is just not gonna happen.
I'm not sure if you're joking but there's actually active court cases right now where they have done just that
Just a few of the perps: Hisham Abugharbieh (Florida student murders), Jonathan Rinderknecht (Palisades Fire arson), Phoenix Ikner (FSU shooter), Ryan Schaefer (Missouri State vandalism)
There's also that thing involving somebody I think he used to be in the NFL and he was using ChatGPT to try to hide the body of his wife or something iirc
Digital evidence is huge for the last couple of decades and this is no different...
Also there was somebody who was just recently sentenced to life in prison for AI CSAM
But yeah I'm sure "this is just not gonna happen." lol
Curious if Thomson Reuters (Westlaw) felt threatened if they were this compelled to moan about it. All it does is make me wonder how well these skills perform when paired with Lexis (if possible?) instead of Westlaw.
This is why I think many of the current application-layer AI startup valuations are a bit iffy. When the big AI companies like Anthropic start expanding their vertical products, the calculus changes.
I'm just wondering how committed they'll be - I guess the edge some startups still have, is the fear that product suites from OpenAI / Anthropic / etc. will go the way of Google products, a year or two then straight to the morgue.
It's like asking what if AWS starts doing it, they have all the infrastructure in place. LLMs are just one cog. There is a lot on the application side they are not doing at all.
Every valuation in the AI space is iffy. Nobody actually has a solid business plan, only vibes, but that isn't stopping people from throwing money at them.
Honest question: How do I convince my fiancé - who is a very busy attorney - to allocate some time to get familiar with the capabilities of tools like Claude for Legal?
I must believe, as with the medical profession's uptake of AI tools, if these tools prove themselves to be reliable and meaningfully helpful, she will experience more than enough professional influence to learn the tools.
As someone who has represented themselves in tribunal before I'm definitely interested in this.
The only issue is that in some jurisdictions, like the UK, you can't just offer someone legal advice without being SRA accredited or FCA regulated.
I.e. this would effectively make Anthropic a claims management firm under the UK law.
> Under article 89I of Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Regulated Activities) Order 2001 ("The Order"), advising a claimant or potential claimant, investigating a claim and representing a claimant, in relation to a financial services or financial product claim is a defined regulated activity.
I guess at some point we will have lawyers, attorneys and judges using this stuff ... at the point lawyers will become kinda "seo"/"copywriter" experts on how to better trick the others LLM.
I think the problem is that laws overlap, with decades of case law clarifying their interactions. Looking at one law probably isn't enough to determine whether an LLM is lying to you.
I'm a bit bothered by this line. Does it mean this is based on customer's sessions? Are they entitled to build knowledge bases for every profession, topic and workflow in the world using customer data?
Yes they are training on your business's data so that their AI can replace your business later. If you don't believe it, name one thing they didn't train on.
It definitely looks like the old tale come true - at Microsoft people would warn against using Google because then Google could figure out what we're working on, since it was pretty easy to tell where a query was coming from.
Sounded far fetched back then, and on the face of it illegal, but now it's just common sense I imagine.
I wonder what clients would think if they discovered their lawyer uses a chatbot with their confidential story. Even with redaction, patterns still emerge. Certainly I wouldn't be happy in any case.
I see this as a strong case for private AI, or an in-house stack.
This is only for PR. No one checks what's in those docs, or if these are real, valid or ethical. The goal here is for all news outlets to pick them up. You're not the audience.
Given the amount of free PR they can get from some AI-generated .md files, I'd probably do the same if I was on their boat.
Right now, I don't think any other AI company generates as much as slop as Anthropic does.
Fake verticals created for no other purpose than to pad out a page in the IPO prospectus. That is literally their purpose, there is no technical or business content here worth discussing, but HackerNews is so pilled it can't help but discuss. Maybe after the 100th "Claude for dog walkers" announcement we'll catch on.
This seems like a shot across the bow for all large Claude API customers, which I'm sure they saw coming.
But still, a TSMC style pure play model provider would win huge business in the space given how many application companies are being eaten by model companies.
Harvey was never very good, or useful. It mostly exists so large law firms can say they do AI. AFAICT. I hope it dies and something useful takes over, but i doubt it :)
Keep in mind harvey starts at like 50-100k, and is well out of the cost range of the vast majority of law firms.
This will help random people dealing with small claims, people cosplaying lawyers to avoid costs, etc.
It will have no effect on the legal startups that are actually good (Eve, et al), because what this stuff does is nowhere close to what most lawyers outside of commercial contract legal counsel spend their time on. I considered doing some AI legal consulting/startups myself, and so have spent tons of time literally sitting down with lawyers in various areas outside of my own and seeing where they spend their time for real.
Let's take one area: personal injury attorneys who aren't in the volume game (which is owned by a fairly small number of large national firms) spend lots of time on case valuation, getting data, and exhibit prep.
None of this is going to help deal with getting missing medical records from places that require that you literally fax random stuff to them, and then call to followup 18 times. I wish i was kidding. Even getting electronic medical records is still a serious pain in the ass, human wise.
Or analyze the past 1000 cases you have (100-1000 documents per case), including what county, what opposing lawyer, counsel, plus the 1000 documents in this case, and give you a sense of how valuable this case is or not.
Or if you are a family lawyer, actually mediating a divorce.
Things like this are what actually useful specialized AI legal products do or at least help with.
Claude is very far away from being able to handle most of these things. It is a jack of all trades tool. Will it be able to do this someday? Maybe.
Additionally, keep in mind most legal startups i've run into are based on caricatures of what lawyers do (IE startups who think that most personal injury lawyers are running around after auto cases and trying to be high volume, etc).
Any lawyer who has deal with legal startups could very quickly tell you which will make it or not, because it's pretty consistent which solve real problems that will be hard to commoditize through things like claude for legal.
While i agree for the most part, they can only cut the middle man so many times before they get themselves in antitrust trouble.
I suspect that will happen faster than they'd like, because regulators (at least outside the US) are not interested in a repeat of Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc.
It will be hilarious to see this one play out because ChatGPT and Perplexity already do wonders for small-claim issues like tenancy laws, various personal letters, etc.
It's already doing wonders for small time businesses and individuals that municipalities think they're free to jerk around because the size of the screwing they're trying to dish out isn't worth hiring a lawyer and/or fighting through court over.
I assure you, in most democracies, most people are jerked around by other people acting in bad faith far more often than their government acting in bad faith.
Landlords, tenants, vendors, business and former romantic partners, clients, banks, even your local gym is way more likely to try to fuck you over than the government is.
The government is just people. Even before the current fiasco, the government had varying degrees of incompetence and malice, and if you're poor you can't do anything about it since the government is presumed to have been operating in good faith and you can't afford a lawyer or the time off work to try to fix it pro se.
I'd invite you to ask a few poor people what happened the last time the government "definitely sent" some important document or another in the mail.
If a governmental employee gets the address wrong, gets the name wrong, accidentally knocks the mail in the trash, lazily marks the job as complete without sending anything, etc, the burden shifts to the poor person to prove not just that they didn't receive the mail but that the sending office didn't behave correctly.
Other cases behave similarly. In a he-said/she-said, the government wins.
I would love this for poor people to fight giant corporations via 'lawfare'. It's largely unethical (just like many corporations) but just knowing how to file junk lawsuits that cost corporations millions to fight would be nice.
I dont mean 'frivolous' like prisoners who file pro-se about their ice cream melting [1], but a level or two above that , that costs time and money to produce records and testimony to defend, even if nary a dime is paid out. Basically ask GPT to figure out the terms and theories to file to get your lawsuit accepted, and done by poor people who cannot afford to post $ or repay if they lose. aka "asymmetric warfare" that benefits the little guy, just like the kind private equity or other terrible corporations wield against the poor via"mandatory arbitration" clauses or damages caps and similar rules that always benefit corporations.
I am reminded of Nilay Patel's "Beware Software Brain" piece in which he cites Legal/Law as one of the industries that tech bros vastly underestimate in terms of how much can be automated this way
Does anyone find it weird that Anthropic's Github org is `anthropics` (with an 's') and the `anthropic` username is owned by some random dude in Australia? Imagine the shenanigans someone can achieve with that user.
But for a beautiful window of a few minutes absolute chaos will ensue. Seems like a huge risk. And if Github/MS have power to do what you're saying, does it feel irresponsible not to do it pre-emptively with an apparently inactive account?
Harvey was always an upstart in the legal tech industry. There's other companies that have a much better understanding of the market and compliance issues but you don't hear about them because nobody wants to talk about legal tech.
As a lawyer, I'm excited about this, but there are two roadblocks that I'm not sure how Anthropic will navigate:
(1) For non-lawyers who use these skills/connectors/whatchamacallits to try to get legal advice, their communications are not protected by attorney-client privilege. This will absolutely bite some people in the ass.
(2) If a lawyer uses this with confidential client information (which, to the uninitiated, doesn't just mean SSNs and bank account numbers, but "all information relating to the representation of a client") and forgets to toggle off "Help improve Claude" in their settings, they have possibly (maybe even likely) committed malpractice.[1]
[1] https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/p...
Citation for #1 - https://harvardlawreview.org/blog/2026/03/united-states-v-he...
> Judge Rakoff of the Southern District of New York — addressing “a question of first impression nationwide” — ruled that written exchanges between a criminal defendant and generative AI platform Claude were not protected by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine.
Much more to it than this one-liner that I pulled out, but safe to say, don't rely on or put your legal defense etc. (or elements of it) into AI unless you want it discovered.
(not a lawyer, unlike OP, who might be able to refine what I highlighted with more precision)
> Much more to it than this one-liner that I pulled out, but safe to say, don't rely on or put your legal defense etc. (or elements of it) into AI unless you want it discovered.
"You are an expert defense counsel with experience in Murder 1. Do not hallucinate. Let's say tomorrow my spouse is found strangled..."
It's the query to Gemini in Incognito asking if a 8'x12' rug is a good way to move a body that's going to really make things difficult.
Good argument for using DeepSeek with an anonymous form of payment.
Discovery in China will be a tad more difficult…
Just use https://tinfoil.sh
They solved all this stuff, I'm surprised more people aren't aware of it.
I use it for medical question for this same reason
In the US, are Google queries about the law considered attorney-client privilege? What about library records? Browser history? Google Maps / Uber / car travel history (when traveling to an attorney's office)?
If somebody Googles "best attorney for murder NYC" a day after a murder is committed but before any case is filed against them (so they clearly had some reason to expect that case), could that be used as evidence?
I'm not sure if you were actually asking the question but regardless the answer is that all of those absolutely can and are regularly used as evidence
Parent comment was asking about attorney-client privilege which means there's an attorney in the communication loop. If the person using a tool is an attorney, then that communication should be protected whether it's by pen or keyboard. But this is an active area of legislation and jurisprudence in relation to AI. I expect some important cases will happen
Just because they have a lawyer does not mean things like their browser history and every other example in the comment I replied to would not be permitted as evidence...
Except for something like specifically looking up a lawyer
Generally seeking counsel for a crime you may end up being accused of isn't going to be admissible as evidence. The "if he's so innocent, why did he hire an attorney" isn't something that judges tend to allow to play out in a courtroom.
Hans Reisee rather infamously checked out a book from the library about how to kill someone and hide the evidence.
Seems like a fair trade off if I would not be able to afford a lawyer. I'd take the "AI but not 100% confidential" any time compared with no help at all.
> exchanges between a criminal defendant and generative AI platform Claude were not protected by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine
Shouldn't that have been relatively clear to all parties involved? Maybe not to the defendant, who's apparently clueless.
The AI platform is not an attorney. A defendant's communications with an AI platform are therefore not communications between a client and their attorney, nor will the AI output constitute attorney "work product" because the AI platform is not an attorney.
Doesn't really come across as a novel problem, aside from AI being involved. I'm sure countless defendants have made the stupid mistake of talking about the facts of their case to persons other than their attorney, and those communications came back to bite them in the ass when discovered.
Can anyone be your lawyer, or does a lawyer have to be certified somehow?
It is my understanding that they must be certified. You are allowed to represent yourself, but it is my understanding that a non-lawyer cannot represent you.
You have to be admitted to the bar to practice law. Which is to say, other lawyers must recognize you as a lawyer, and this recognition can be taken away.
More practically, this means (in America) that you need a JD degree (4 year grad school), to pass an exam, and pass a(n oftrn horrifically thorough) character background check.
Minor point, but law school is only 3 years long.
> pass a(n oftrn horrifically thorough) character background check.
Explains why so many let loose afterwards ;) jokes
I think they are asking about privileged communication
For (1) it's so wild to me that if I pay a lawyer, they can run the same queries on these tools and they are protected by attorney-client privilege, but if I do it to help me prepare my defense, then the exact same queries would be subject to subpoena/discovery.
Does anyone know if there exists any OPSEC procedure for me to use third party tools like this for my own concerning legal questions that is both ethical and allows me to be confident that my interactions won't land in discovery documents?
If you are preparing for your own defense and don't have an attorney (you're acting pro se), your own LLM use would likely be protected under work product doctrine. The court would extend you some of the same protections an attorney would have, for the limited purposes of preparing your case.
This is a very narrow exemption, however.
(You would also want to make sure you're using a paid AI plan with contractually guaranteed privacy protections, otherwise it could be construed as third-party communications, which implicitly waives privilege.)
See: Warner v. Gilbarco, Inc.
So not familiar with the caselaw around work product, but if you use an API tool directly and not the different chat tools, the queries are not permanently cached for anyone to give up in the end.
So basically if you use any of the CLI tools, there is nothing for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. to give the courts.
Online ChatGPT (especially the free version), are apparently cached by OpenAI on their servers. (I am not sure if Claude Desktop caches the conversations locally or in the cloud as well, read the fine print if it matters!)
Indeed, there is no way my terabytes per day of API calls is getting permanently stored anywhere.
Perhaps an AI generated summary of it is.
interesting angle - how are/would compressed context (i.e. the parts of the user-LLM transcription likely to be saved) be treated by the courts? Would this be considered hearsay?
> Does anyone know if there exists any OPSEC procedure for me to use third party tools like this for my own concerning legal questions that is both ethical and allows me to be confident that my interactions won't land in discovery documents?
Isn't that a fundamental misunderstanding? Would "OPSEC" like that amount to destruction of evidence or contempt of court or something like that?
Like if all your incriminating documents are on some encrypted drive, it's not like that defeats discovery. You're supposed to decrypt them and hand them over.
Your only practical defence is to set up a local LLM that destroys records in a predictable way (immediately, on a time table and so forth) and then ensure however you access that doesn’t leave any traces either.
And then you need to consistently use this for purposes other than crime.
That’s absolutely part of my question. I’m not familiar enough with discovery to fully understand this.
Discovery in a criminal trial is more limited than in a civil trial.
Your only real defense against discovery is to not have said it, or to have destroyed all records of it before the hint of discovery wafted on the wind.
Wouldn't that same logic exclude evidence from Google searches, like "how to get away with murder"?
Yes? Which makes it feel like the answer is just “No.” Unless you use Mullvad, TailsOS, and don’t log into the service. But I’m not sure if that’s “ethical” for Google/DDG searches and it’s not really possible for Claude/Kagi. I would assume that simply using a “secret” account isn't a magic way to avoid discovery either.
> if I do it to help me prepare my defense, then the exact same queries would be subject to subpoena/discovery
We need a law where someone can clearly designate a chat privileged, with severe consequences for mis-use.
>For (1) it's so wild to me that if I pay a lawyer, they can run the same queries on these tools and they are protected by attorney-client privilege, but if I do it to help me prepare my defense, then the exact same queries would be subject to subpoena/discovery.
How's this any different than any professional license? You're basically paying for preferential treatment from the state in a given subject area.
> How's this any different than any professional license? You're basically paying for preferential treatment from the state in a given subject area.
Because it's got nothing to do with the professional part? Licensing should affect their practice of law, sure, but it shouldn't grant random other privileges.
Self host your own LLM
Why do you think this would be less discoverable than hosting your own email server?
If you use a stateless client (like just rawdogging cli llama.cpp) there’s nothing to discover. Setting a program with an option to have logs to not do that could conceivably get you in trouble but using a widely used program that never had logs seems like it has to be fine. Maybe they could nail you for googling “which local llm approach generates logs?” also, don’t get nailed by your bash history!
Because you don't keep logs.
Because nobody would know about it unless you told them for some reason
That might fall under the “unethical” part of my question. Could “probably” get away with it if done carefully, but I’d rather be fully in compliance.
Why would self-hosting for privacy reasons be unethical just because the query would be subject to subpoena in principle?
You’d need to hand that mac mini over if subpoenaed
Can’t hand over something that doesn’t exist if it’s running in a VM container and gets destroyed every 12 hours
#1 is a little complicated. Communications with an AI are possibly sometimes protected by work-product doctrine... but only if you're representing yourself as a pro se litigant, and strictly limited to mental impressions and opinion work product of counsel (in this case, extended to the pro se litigant). See: Warner v. Gilbarco, Inc.
There's a good summary of the current state of things here: https://www.akerman.com/en/perspectives/ai-privilege-and-wor...
Also worth noting that none of this is binding precedent, so expect this field to evolve over time.
On (1), what if the law firm hosts the AI chat?
It seems like local AI could be valuable for law firms for reasons of (2) as well
For #2, I’d expect you’d use this through an organization/business account that has data retention turned off by default.
Can’t #1 be solved with the stroke of a pen? “Legal queries to LLMs shall be subject to the same attorney-client privilege”
Why? The social environment the judge probably includes lots of lawyers.
He needs to take care of them. Snitches get stitches.
Seems like a good use case for a locally deployed LLM though that's annoying and expensive to maintain sophisticated one like deepseek.
Slightly related: Amazon’s bedrock has better privacy guarantees. This seems to be skills that can be added to Desktop app, which can connect to Bedrock for inference.
Also in all seriousness, can we actually trust that setting? I might be paranoid, but that doesn't mean that the whole world hasn't broken my trust...
what if either user uses these skills with offline weights? should help with 2), at least right?
In the legal world are there certifications for handling privileged information?
For example in the medical world if you are a provider covered by HIPAA you must have a signed "Business Associate Agreement" with any party that handles the covered protected health information (PHI).
It’s a bit of a moot point because the amount of times that your AI logs are going to be subpoenaed in your court case approaches zero.
> As a lawyer, I'm excited about this,
As in "I'm excited to win a lot of money dismantling hallucinated quotations and invalid assumptions"?
You can't criticize LLMs and Anthropic on a website where everybody and their grandma uses them for everything. New generation of brainlets that are gonna be clueless without constant Internet connection is brewing and it's gonna be hilarious.
-2 points at the time you wrote this comment :)
I wonder why there isn't much for real estate in this package.
Are they perhaps working on a totally different real estate project. I am in that space and very nervous about it getting wiped out by anthropic or openAI.
To be honest, I am not sure why they still haven't make a big play for that industry.
I’d guess they have some kind of analytics telling them what kind of questions are being asked.
It seems to me that heavily gate kept professions/knowledge will go first. As those tend to be extensive opinions to get.
Just remember that your AI chat history is not protected like attorney client privilege and can be used as evidence against you in court. If you talk to a lawyer and they use AI, those chats are privileged.
No. If you talk to an attorney and they take reasonable precautions to maintain the integrity of the confidential attorney client relationship, the privilege is preserved. If not, not preserved.
I don’t understand this situation .. where in your court case the prosecutor asks a judge to get a warrant for your AI chat logs … this is just not gonna happen.
I'm not sure if you're joking but there's actually active court cases right now where they have done just that
Just a few of the perps: Hisham Abugharbieh (Florida student murders), Jonathan Rinderknecht (Palisades Fire arson), Phoenix Ikner (FSU shooter), Ryan Schaefer (Missouri State vandalism)
There's also that thing involving somebody I think he used to be in the NFL and he was using ChatGPT to try to hide the body of his wife or something iirc
Digital evidence is huge for the last couple of decades and this is no different...
Also there was somebody who was just recently sentenced to life in prison for AI CSAM
But yeah I'm sure "this is just not gonna happen." lol
IANAL but I believe discovery is where this would happen.
In most cases this would be coming up in a criminal case not a civil case so it would be through search warrants and subpoenas not discovery
why not?
It seems like they ripped out Lexis, which is probably one of the most important tools for lawyers: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-for-legal/pull/5.
> at partner request
Curious if Thomson Reuters (Westlaw) felt threatened if they were this compelled to moan about it. All it does is make me wonder how well these skills perform when paired with Lexis (if possible?) instead of Westlaw.
Can't we just use the version of the codebase from before that change?
This is why I think many of the current application-layer AI startup valuations are a bit iffy. When the big AI companies like Anthropic start expanding their vertical products, the calculus changes.
I'm just wondering how committed they'll be - I guess the edge some startups still have, is the fear that product suites from OpenAI / Anthropic / etc. will go the way of Google products, a year or two then straight to the morgue.
It's like asking what if AWS starts doing it, they have all the infrastructure in place. LLMs are just one cog. There is a lot on the application side they are not doing at all.
Every valuation in the AI space is iffy. Nobody actually has a solid business plan, only vibes, but that isn't stopping people from throwing money at them.
Honest question: How do I convince my fiancé - who is a very busy attorney - to allocate some time to get familiar with the capabilities of tools like Claude for Legal?
I must believe, as with the medical profession's uptake of AI tools, if these tools prove themselves to be reliable and meaningfully helpful, she will experience more than enough professional influence to learn the tools.
As someone who has represented themselves in tribunal before I'm definitely interested in this.
The only issue is that in some jurisdictions, like the UK, you can't just offer someone legal advice without being SRA accredited or FCA regulated. I.e. this would effectively make Anthropic a claims management firm under the UK law.
> Under article 89I of Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Regulated Activities) Order 2001 ("The Order"), advising a claimant or potential claimant, investigating a claim and representing a claimant, in relation to a financial services or financial product claim is a defined regulated activity.
https://www.fca.org.uk/freedom-information/dual-regulation-c...
I guess at some point we will have lawyers, attorneys and judges using this stuff ... at the point lawyers will become kinda "seo"/"copywriter" experts on how to better trick the others LLM.
Almost makes me want to get a law degree.
I mean, the laws are written down somewhere though. A human can still look at the actual law and surmise that the AI is feeding them bullshit.
I think the problem is that laws overlap, with decades of case law clarifying their interactions. Looking at one law probably isn't enough to determine whether an LLM is lying to you.
Human judges today often don't bother to look at "the actual law" and surmise that the human is feeding them bullshit.
the look on the face of the Court administrator upon hearing someone describe the "paperclip maximizer" problem.. ominous!
This is the third category they've entered this quarter
> for the legal workflows we see most
I'm a bit bothered by this line. Does it mean this is based on customer's sessions? Are they entitled to build knowledge bases for every profession, topic and workflow in the world using customer data?
Yes they are training on your business's data so that their AI can replace your business later. If you don't believe it, name one thing they didn't train on.
It definitely looks like the old tale come true - at Microsoft people would warn against using Google because then Google could figure out what we're working on, since it was pretty easy to tell where a query was coming from.
Sounded far fetched back then, and on the face of it illegal, but now it's just common sense I imagine.
And in what country? They know that the law is different in every country right?
"Are (legally and morally) entitled" vs "act as if they are entitled"... yes, a big question.
I wonder what clients would think if they discovered their lawyer uses a chatbot with their confidential story. Even with redaction, patterns still emerge. Certainly I wouldn't be happy in any case.
I see this as a strong case for private AI, or an in-house stack.
Or I have to be missing something.
Your lawyer uses cloud software, this is no different.
Anthropics New Playbook:
`/loop 2days /create-new-{insert-industry}-md-files`
This is only for PR. No one checks what's in those docs, or if these are real, valid or ethical. The goal here is for all news outlets to pick them up. You're not the audience.
Given the amount of free PR they can get from some AI-generated .md files, I'd probably do the same if I was on their boat.
Right now, I don't think any other AI company generates as much as slop as Anthropic does.
Fake verticals created for no other purpose than to pad out a page in the IPO prospectus. That is literally their purpose, there is no technical or business content here worth discussing, but HackerNews is so pilled it can't help but discuss. Maybe after the 100th "Claude for dog walkers" announcement we'll catch on.
There's going to be a "Claude for wiping my ass" at this rate.
I’m working on ways to evaluate and give feedback on surgical techniques. But you just helped me find a new pivot. Thanks! And yes I’m on the toilet.
You jest, but combination of robotics and AI is likely the only constructive way to deal with the population getting older.
It's like that short animation of a Kiwi bird getting high[1].
Each cycle gets shorter and shorter to sustain the high.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUngLgGRJpo
This seems like a shot across the bow for all large Claude API customers, which I'm sure they saw coming.
But still, a TSMC style pure play model provider would win huge business in the space given how many application companies are being eaten by model companies.
How does this compare to the other legal tech ai startup products?
Harvey is valued at $11b
Lawyer here:
Harvey was never very good, or useful. It mostly exists so large law firms can say they do AI. AFAICT. I hope it dies and something useful takes over, but i doubt it :)
Keep in mind harvey starts at like 50-100k, and is well out of the cost range of the vast majority of law firms.
This will help random people dealing with small claims, people cosplaying lawyers to avoid costs, etc.
It will have no effect on the legal startups that are actually good (Eve, et al), because what this stuff does is nowhere close to what most lawyers outside of commercial contract legal counsel spend their time on. I considered doing some AI legal consulting/startups myself, and so have spent tons of time literally sitting down with lawyers in various areas outside of my own and seeing where they spend their time for real.
Let's take one area: personal injury attorneys who aren't in the volume game (which is owned by a fairly small number of large national firms) spend lots of time on case valuation, getting data, and exhibit prep.
None of this is going to help deal with getting missing medical records from places that require that you literally fax random stuff to them, and then call to followup 18 times. I wish i was kidding. Even getting electronic medical records is still a serious pain in the ass, human wise.
Or analyze the past 1000 cases you have (100-1000 documents per case), including what county, what opposing lawyer, counsel, plus the 1000 documents in this case, and give you a sense of how valuable this case is or not.
Or if you are a family lawyer, actually mediating a divorce.
Things like this are what actually useful specialized AI legal products do or at least help with.
Claude is very far away from being able to handle most of these things. It is a jack of all trades tool. Will it be able to do this someday? Maybe.
Additionally, keep in mind most legal startups i've run into are based on caricatures of what lawyers do (IE startups who think that most personal injury lawyers are running around after auto cases and trying to be high volume, etc).
Any lawyer who has deal with legal startups could very quickly tell you which will make it or not, because it's pretty consistent which solve real problems that will be hard to commoditize through things like claude for legal.
Same as it compared against "Build your website without any code" startups 2 months ago. Now they are dropping like flies.
A life of every thin wrapper company will be the same. Anthropic/OpenAI will just cut the middle-man as soon as they see potential.
While i agree for the most part, they can only cut the middle man so many times before they get themselves in antitrust trouble.
I suspect that will happen faster than they'd like, because regulators (at least outside the US) are not interested in a repeat of Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc.
Investors in Harvey and Legora are both in for a rude shock.
should rename to "claude for US legal"
It will be hilarious to see this one play out because ChatGPT and Perplexity already do wonders for small-claim issues like tenancy laws, various personal letters, etc.
It's already doing wonders for small time businesses and individuals that municipalities think they're free to jerk around because the size of the screwing they're trying to dish out isn't worth hiring a lawyer and/or fighting through court over.
I assure you, in most democracies, most people are jerked around by other people acting in bad faith far more often than their government acting in bad faith.
Landlords, tenants, vendors, business and former romantic partners, clients, banks, even your local gym is way more likely to try to fuck you over than the government is.
The government is just people. Even before the current fiasco, the government had varying degrees of incompetence and malice, and if you're poor you can't do anything about it since the government is presumed to have been operating in good faith and you can't afford a lawyer or the time off work to try to fix it pro se.
There is no such presumption in court. If you've been wronged you can get recompense regardless of their intent.
I'd invite you to ask a few poor people what happened the last time the government "definitely sent" some important document or another in the mail.
If a governmental employee gets the address wrong, gets the name wrong, accidentally knocks the mail in the trash, lazily marks the job as complete without sending anything, etc, the burden shifts to the poor person to prove not just that they didn't receive the mail but that the sending office didn't behave correctly.
Other cases behave similarly. In a he-said/she-said, the government wins.
I would love this for poor people to fight giant corporations via 'lawfare'. It's largely unethical (just like many corporations) but just knowing how to file junk lawsuits that cost corporations millions to fight would be nice.
I dont mean 'frivolous' like prisoners who file pro-se about their ice cream melting [1], but a level or two above that , that costs time and money to produce records and testimony to defend, even if nary a dime is paid out. Basically ask GPT to figure out the terms and theories to file to get your lawsuit accepted, and done by poor people who cannot afford to post $ or repay if they lose. aka "asymmetric warfare" that benefits the little guy, just like the kind private equity or other terrible corporations wield against the poor via"mandatory arbitration" clauses or damages caps and similar rules that always benefit corporations.
1. https://www.deseret.com/1994/3/21/19098386/melted-ice-cream-...
I am reminded of Nilay Patel's "Beware Software Brain" piece in which he cites Legal/Law as one of the industries that tech bros vastly underestimate in terms of how much can be automated this way
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba...
(Search for "another example" for the relevant section)
Great, this will finally help people in online forums write legal comments that make sense.
Is this usable just for US law?
This won’t go well for them, the legal system is intentionally obfuscated and corrupt, can’t bring law and order to law and order.
Does anyone find it weird that Anthropic's Github org is `anthropics` (with an 's') and the `anthropic` username is owned by some random dude in Australia? Imagine the shenanigans someone can achieve with that user.
>Imagine the shenanigans someone can achieve with that user.
First step out of line and that account along with anything remotely connected will be banned to oblivion.
Given they share models on Azure, Anthropic will have someone at Microsoft on speed dial.
I've even seen disconnected commit hashes disappear during their security responses which the repo owner has no way of removing.
But for a beautiful window of a few minutes absolute chaos will ensue. Seems like a huge risk. And if Github/MS have power to do what you're saying, does it feel irresponsible not to do it pre-emptively with an apparently inactive account?
One would think that they could spontaneously offer him a hundred million dollars for it and solve the problem.
I half-suspect they threatened him and he stuck to his guns.
Paying for stuff is not part of their modus operandi.
A mere .01% equity seems fair
It's possible they wanted to offer that person convincing amounts of money and couldn't get ahold of them.
Shades of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comput...
It made me double check if it was a fake repo.
RIP Harvey
Good. Harvey was never actually good.
Harvey was always an upstart in the legal tech industry. There's other companies that have a much better understanding of the market and compliance issues but you don't hear about them because nobody wants to talk about legal tech.
who do you think stands out?
Blog post: https://claude.com/blog/claude-for-the-legal-industry (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113982)
if ever there was a domain for an LLM to be sloppy, reckless or emit lies or hallucinations it would be related to law advice and legal documents
er, wait
Would use it if it wasn't supporting the space wanker
Who? There are several space wankers but I don't know of any tied to Anthropic.
I guess he his referring to Musk. IIRC Anthropic uses compute of xAI or whatever it is called atm.