Your Clients Are Typing Their Case Into ChatGPT

Here is something that is happening to your future clients right now. Before they call anyone, they open a chatbot and describe the accident. How it happened, who they think was at fault, what the doctor said, what the adjuster offered. They get a friendly, confident answer, and they feel better informed. Then they call you.

In February 2026 a federal court decided what that conversation is. It is not privileged, it may be discoverable, and the act of having it can waive protection over the facts that were shared. That is a problem your intake process inherits on day one, whether or not anyone at the firm knows it happened.

What the Heppner Ruling Said

In United States v. Heppner, Judge Rakoff in the Southern District of New York held that a party who fed case details into a consumer AI chatbot could not claim privilege over them. The reasoning was plain. A chatbot is not a law firm. It holds no license, owes no duty of loyalty, and its own terms say inputs may be used for training and disclosed when legally compelled. Sharing with it is sharing with a third party, and a third party is where privilege ends.

The court did not say all AI use is fatal. A second 2026 decision, Warner v. Gilbarco, protected attorney-directed AI work as work product, because it was done under a lawyer's professional duties and never handed to an adversary. The line the courts are drawing is not the technology. It is who is using it, and under what terms.

What Your Clients Are Actually Typing

From the conversations we have seen, the things people volunteer to a chatbot are the things they used to say only to a lawyer:

• The accident itself. What they did in the seconds before it. Chatbots ask follow-up questions, and people answer them.
• Their medical picture. Diagnoses, treatment, and what they think it is worth.
• What they told the adjuster. Often pasted in whole, with a request to explain it.
• Your emails. Once they have retained you, some of them paste your letters in to "summarize" them.

Every one of those is now a record that opposing counsel can ask for. Deleting it once a claim is foreseeable is a spoliation problem on top of the disclosure problem.

What a Firm Can Do About It

You cannot stop people from using chatbots. You can change what happens at your front door, in three places.

Intake. Add one question to the script: have you discussed this with an AI chatbot, and if so, please do not delete it. Asked early, this is a manageable fact. Discovered at deposition, it is not.

Your website. A short, plain page on what not to type into a chatbot about an injury is the kind of content people search for at exactly the moment they are about to do it. It also tells a prospective client something about how carefully you think.

Your own tools. If your site offers anything interactive, a case evaluator, a chat, an intake form with a model behind it, it has to be built so that using it does not create the same problem the chatbot did. That is a design decision, not a disclaimer.

What "Private by Design" Looks Like

We built a settlement calculator that walks an injured person through their case in conversation, and every choice in it follows from the ruling above. Names, phone numbers, emails and addresses are stripped before anything leaves the server. The model runs under a contract that prohibits training on the input. The conversation is encrypted at rest and deleted within thirty days. Nothing is sold, and nothing is sent to a law firm.

None of that is exotic. It is the difference between a tool designed by someone who read the ruling and one designed by someone who read a vendor's brochure. The same rules apply to any AI a firm puts in front of a client, which is most of what our consulting work ends up being about.

The Question to Ask Any Vendor

If a product will touch a client's facts, ask one thing before the demo: where does the input go, and what would a subpoena to you produce? A vendor who answers by describing their encryption has not understood the question. The courts have.