alt Hacker NewsWell, what type of phone call? You mean a phone call between a lawyer and a client? If so, then, of course it is protected, because it is communication between the lawyer and the client. It is not a good analogy for Claude chats because those chats are not communication between a laywer and a client.
The concept of sharing the chat with the lawyer will not work, since as the ruling points out, you cannot turn a non-privileged document into a privileged one by sharing it with your lawyer after the fact.
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> It is not a good analogy for Claude chats because those chats are not communication between a laywer and a client.
How is it not? I get that a chatbot is not a person with rights. And NAL.
But for all intents and purposes, it is a communication about legal advice. The way a lot of people use it is legal advice. They will continue to use it that way.
So for the law to then turn around and say that it's evidence that will be used against them is kind of messed up. It means confidentiality of your case is bought by paying a lawyer for legal protection, not because you actually need their advice over a chatbot's.
I don't think it's communication at all. Instead, I think it's a kind of lookup. Dealing with an LLM is searching a database. You are looking up legal texts in order to prepare legal arguments.
I think the principled way of treating this is that it's privileged for the purpose of preparing legal arguments, but not privileged in general. I think this can be supported using the existing law.
Presumably a lawyer's Google searches with terms like "what article is X" etc. are privileged too, since they are used for preparing legal arguments. That it uses AI doesn't suddenly make it communication.