What Every Client Needs to Know About Using AI For Legal Advice, From Your Legal Team
It’s hard to imagine a conversation about business, or really about anything, that doesn’t involve AI these days. It’s in our phones, our inboxes, our search results, and increasingly, our workplaces. Tools like ChatGPT have gone from curiosity and working in the background to commonplace and prominently in the forefront of everything almost overnight. Understandably, business owners are exploring how to use AI to work smarter and faster. We get it. We’re curious, too.
But as your attorneys, it’s our job to make sure that curiosity doesn’t create unexpected risk. So we want to share a few honest thoughts about how you can use AI relevant to your legal decisions, both opportunities and challenges, not to discourage you from using AI, but to help you use it wisely and to your advantage both strategically and financially. This isn’t really a rant but you can decide!
AI Gives You Information. Your Attorney Gives You Answers and Options.
One of the most valuable things AI can do is help you understand a topic quickly. Need a general overview of California’s meal and rest break requirements? AI can give you a solid starting point.
But here’s something worth keeping in mind: while the basic law or requirement is sometimes straightforward, your specific situation isn’t. Your business priorities, the fact pattern of your challenge, your business goals and concerns, the players, leadership’s ability to handle and process risk and financial ability all differ greatly. Each case is really unique.
If you asked ten employment attorneys the same question, you’d likely get ten different answers (all of which could be correct and viable solutions), not because any of them are wrong, but because legal guidance isn’t one-size-fits-all and every business and every attorney have their own style, focus, and method by which they make decisions and give advice. The reason you chose your attorney isn’t just because they passed the bar. It’s because you trust their judgment, their approach, and the way they understand your business specifically.
And this unique ability to take in all the facts of a particular situation and offer a strategy (or ten) is why an attorney’s favorite phrase is “it depends.” It depends on all of the elements present in your particular case. That’s often why we ask you a lot of questions you may not think are important but once we formulate a strategy you understand why we needed that information. It’s easy to answer an easy question. But most legal situations aren’t easy.
AI doesn’t know your business. It doesn’t know your history, your team dynamics, your risk tolerance, or the nuances of your situation. So while it can be a great way to build general understanding, real-world problems still need real-world counsel. And a word of practical caution: when clients bring in AI-generated research or draft policies for us to review, we genuinely appreciate the effort, but it often means more work, not less. We have to evaluate what’s accurate, what doesn’t apply to your situation, and what needs to be redone entirely. Sometimes starting from scratch is actually faster.
Be Careful What You Share, Especially If You’re in a Dispute
This one is EXTREMELY important, and we want to make sure it lands clearly: please be thoughtful about what information you enter into AI tools. DO NOT UPLOAD CONFIDENTIAL, PROPRIETARY, FINANCIAL INFORMATION INTO A PUBLICLY AI PLATFORM. Period. Especially avoid sharing anything sensitive if you are currently involved in or anticipating any kind of legal dispute.
Here’s why: When you share information with your attorney, it’s protected under attorney-client privilege, meaning it generally can’t be used against you. When you share that same information with an AI tool in order to play out a scenario or find out potential options or answers to resolve a dispute, you may waive your established attorney-client privilege. Depending on the circumstances, what you typed or uploaded into a chatbot could become discoverable by opposing counsel.
Beyond the litigation context, most consumer-facing AI tools, the free or standard versions many of us use daily, may retain your inputs and incorporate them into their systems and learning. That means sensitive business information, personnel details, or confidential matters you type in don’t necessarily stay private. It’s not a reason to avoid AI altogether, but it is a reason to be selective about what you share and which tools you use.
If you can’t help yourself and you want to process a problem or option with AI, carefully consider how you frame the question, anonymize as much as possible, don’t use actual names, figures or any information that could identify you or your company etc. Keep it high level.
But try to just call the professionals who can help you. AI is evolving so quickly and it’s impossible to anticipate every single way something we do could affect us in the future. Adopting new technologies with savvy, thoughtfulness, and caution is the best way to go at this point.
The Bottom Line
AI is a genuinely useful resource, and we’d never tell you to ignore it. We don’t want any of our clients to be dinosaurs who don’t modernize their companies or their thinking. However, like any tool, it works best when you understand its usefulness and its limits. Use it to learn, to brainstorm, and to get oriented, then bring your challenges and questions to counsel. That’s what we’re here for and will add value to your strategy and solution beyond AI’s capabilities.
As always, if you have questions about how your team is using AI in the workplace, or want to talk through policies around and use of AI for your employees, clients and partners (which we recommend), we’re happy to help.
