Glossary

DEFINITION

Attorney-Client Privilege

A legal doctrine protecting confidential communications between a lawyer and client from compelled disclosure — and one of the easiest privileges to inadvertently waive.

In depth

Attorney-client privilege protects confidential communications between a lawyer and client made for the purpose of seeking or providing legal advice. The privilege is the client's, not the lawyer's, and is one of the oldest doctrines in common-law systems. Critically for AI users, the privilege can be waived — including by voluntarily disclosing the communication to a third party. Whether pasting a privileged document into a generative AI service constitutes such a disclosure is a developing legal question; courts have begun to address it (see e.g. United States v. Heppner, No. 3:23-cr-00044, W.D. Va. 2024). Even where waiver is uncertain, the prudent posture is not to disclose privileged material to systems whose contents the client cannot control.

Examples

  • A litigator pasting a draft brief that contains privileged client analysis into ChatGPT to get redline suggestions.
  • An associate using a coding assistant to refactor a privileged spreadsheet of case strategy notes.
  • A paralegal asking an AI tool to summarise privileged email correspondence with the client.

How Locke handles attorney-client privilege

Locke's Legal industry profile detects patterns associated with privileged material — case numbers, witness identifiers, privilege headers, work-product references. Detection happens locally; nothing leaves the device, which means the act of running Locke itself does not implicate waiver.

See the product

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