More than a dozen major U.S. law firms have since issued client advisories warning that conversations with AI chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT carry no legal protection when they touch legal matters. Some have gone further: firms are now embedding that warning directly into the contracts they sign with clients before representation even begins.
"We are telling our clients: You should proceed with caution here," Alexandria Gutiérrez Swette, a lawyer at New York-based Kobre & Kim, told Reuters.
Other firms are now racing to set guardrails. Reuters reports that O'Melveny & Myers and others have told clients to use only "closed," enterprise-grade AI systems, acknowledging that even enterprise AI remains largely untested in court on this question.
Debevoise & Plimpton went a step further with tactical advice: If a lawyer specifically directs a client to use an AI tool, the client should say so inside the chatbot prompt itself. The firm suggested writing "I am doing this research at the direction of counsel for X litigation." The idea seems to be setting the conditions to invoke the Kovel doctrine, which can extend attorney-client privilege to non-lawyers working as an attorney's agent.
The ruling that shook the practiceJudge 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 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.
