In the US, are Google queries about the law considered attorney-client privilege? What about library records? Browser history? Google Maps / Uber / car travel history (when traveling to an attorney's office)?

If somebody Googles "best attorney for murder NYC" a day after a murder is committed but before any case is filed against them (so they clearly had some reason to expect that case), could that be used as evidence?

> exchanges between a criminal defendant and generative AI platform Claude were not protected by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine

Shouldn't that have been relatively clear to all parties involved? Maybe not to the defendant, who's apparently clueless.

The AI platform is not an attorney. A defendant's communications with an AI platform are therefore not communications between a client and their attorney, nor will the AI output constitute attorney "work product" because the AI platform is not an attorney.

Doesn't really come across as a novel problem, aside from AI being involved. I'm sure countless defendants have made the stupid mistake of talking about the facts of their case to persons other than their attorney, and those communications came back to bite them in the ass when discovered.

Can anyone be your lawyer, or does a lawyer have to be certified somehow?

If you are preparing for your own defense and don't have an attorney (you're acting pro se), your own LLM use would likely be protected under work product doctrine. The court would extend you some of the same protections an attorney would have, for the limited purposes of preparing your case.

This is a very narrow exemption, however.

(You would also want to make sure you're using a paid AI plan with contractually guaranteed privacy protections, otherwise it could be construed as third-party communications, which implicitly waives privilege.)

See: Warner v. Gilbarco, Inc.

> Does anyone know if there exists any OPSEC procedure for me to use third party tools like this for my own concerning legal questions that is both ethical and allows me to be confident that my interactions won't land in discovery documents?

Isn't that a fundamental misunderstanding? Would "OPSEC" like that amount to destruction of evidence or contempt of court or something like that?

Like if all your incriminating documents are on some encrypted drive, it's not like that defeats discovery. You're supposed to decrypt them and hand them over.

> if I do it to help me prepare my defense, then the exact same queries would be subject to subpoena/discovery

We need a law where someone can clearly designate a chat privileged, with severe consequences for mis-use.

Wouldn't that same logic exclude evidence from Google searches, like "how to get away with murder"?

>For (1) it's so wild to me that if I pay a lawyer, they can run the same queries on these tools and they are protected by attorney-client privilege, but if I do it to help me prepare my defense, then the exact same queries would be subject to subpoena/discovery.

How's this any different than any professional license? You're basically paying for preferential treatment from the state in a given subject area.

Self host your own LLM