Legal

Using AI safely to protect privilege and confidentiality

Apply practical safeguards when using AI in a dispute context (e.g., avoid sharing settlement expectations, avoid writing anything you wouldn't want disclosed, only upload documents you expect to disclose, and disable model-training on chats).

Why the human is still essential here

Only a legal professional (or informed litigant) can assess privilege, confidentiality, disclosure obligations, and litigation risk for the specific case.

How people use this

Enterprise AI workspace with no-training defaults

Use an enterprise AI chat workspace configured so prompts/outputs aren’t used to train models and access is controlled via admin policies.

ChatGPT Enterprise / Claude for Work

DLP and sensitivity labels to block risky prompts

Apply sensitivity labels and DLP rules so highly confidential or privileged content cannot be pasted or uploaded into AI chat tools.

Microsoft Purview + Microsoft 365 Copilot

Private LLM endpoint for sensitive document analysis

Route prompts through a private, contract-covered LLM endpoint to keep processing within an approved environment and reduce disclosure risk.

Azure OpenAI Service

Community stories (1)

Warning on use of AI

There was a recent decision in US that said AI prompts were disclosable in litigation as they didn't attract privilege (I have incredibly oversimplified this)

Whilst we are a completely different jurisdiction and have different rules on privilege, but this serves as a good warning.

Spoiler - lawyers use AI, personally I use two different AI tools (one attached to a legal research database and the other on my case management system) both cost a huge amount of money per year compared to the open-source products and also have GDPR compliant data controls (unlike open source). But I know how the free/low cost alternatives have been useful to many litigants. So don't stop, but be wise, just in case we somehow follow the US court's lead, this would include:
- no telling AI your settlement expectations
- no writing anything you wouldn't want your opponent or courts to see
- if you're uploading documents to analyse make sure it is a document that is in circulation or that you will be disclosing
- turn off the feature that allows the chat to train other models

Lawyers on this page, can you think of any other tips?

lucalibzEmployment lawyer

Feb 26, 2026