Client Confidentiality and AI Tools

The paste that felt routine

You have a witness statement to tidy, a long email chain to summarise, a draft letter that needs to be shorter. The obvious move is to paste it into an AI tool and ask for help. It works well, which is exactly why people do it before anyone has asked whether they should.

For most people that is a data protection question. For you it is also a question of professional duty. Confidentiality sits close to the centre of legal practice, and in many jurisdictions so does privilege. What those duties require when you use a third-party AI tool depends on your jurisdiction, your regulator, the terms of your engagement and your firm's arrangements with the tool provider. This lesson does not tell you what your obligations are. It gives you a way of working that keeps you on the right side of them while you find out.

Where your text goes

When you type into an AI tool, the text leaves your device and is processed on someone else's systems. Depending on the tool and the plan, it may be stored for a period, reviewed for safety purposes, or used to improve the product. Business and enterprise arrangements often differ from free consumer plans on these points, but terms vary between providers and change, so the only reliable answer is the one your firm has checked for the specific tool and plan.

Training is not the only concern. Stored conversations can be exposed if an account is compromised. Shared logins let colleagues see each other's history. And whether sending material to a third-party service has any effect on privilege is a legal question for your own jurisdiction. Do not assume the answer either way.

Only approved tools

The simplest and most important rule: client and matter material goes only into tools your firm or organisation has approved for that kind of material, used in the way the approval allows.

An approval usually means someone has looked at the contract terms, where the data goes, who can access it, how long it is kept and whether it is used for training. You cannot do that assessment from inside a chat window, and a tool being popular, free or recommended by a colleague is not an approval.

If there is no approved tool, the answer for client material is no, for now. You can still use a general tool for things that contain no client information at all: explaining a concept to yourself, drafting a generic checklist, improving the wording of a template that has never been near a client file.

Redaction: useful, but not magic

Even with an approved tool, it is good practice to share only what the task needs. Most drafting and summarising tasks do not need real names. They need the structure and the problem.

Be honest with yourself about what redaction achieves. In a small market or a well-known dispute, the facts alone can identify a client even with every name removed. Redaction reduces risk. It does not turn confidential material into non-confidential material, and it is not a substitute for using an approved tool.

Do not ask me to paste the document yet.
I need to get help with a [type of document] that contains
confidential client information.
List the categories of detail I should replace before pasting:
names, organisations, addresses, reference numbers, dates or events
that could identify the matter, and unusual facts that could identify
it on their own.
Suggest a labelling scheme (Client A, Party B, Site C) and remind me
to keep the key outside this tool.

Consent and your engagement terms

Some clients will have views about AI tools being used on their matters, and some engagement terms or client guidelines address it directly. Whether you need client consent, and in what form, depends on your rules and your agreement with the client. Find out what your firm's standard terms say, check any client-specific guidelines, and if in doubt ask the responsible partner or your risk team before starting.

When you make the wrong choice

At some point, you or someone on your team will paste something into the wrong tool. It is an easy mistake, made quickly, often under time pressure.

What matters then is what you do next. The instinct is to close the window and say nothing. That is the choice that turns a mistake into a problem. Your firm may have obligations to assess what happened, to notify someone, or to take steps with the provider, and it can only do that if it knows. Deadlines for some of those steps may be short.

So tell someone promptly: your supervisor, your risk or compliance team, or whoever your firm's policy names. Say what was shared, in which tool, and when. Do not try to fix it quietly yourself, and follow your firm's process rather than improvising one. People who report their own mistakes quickly are the reason firms catch problems while they are still small.