Local attorney Jim Scheinkman says he’s integrated AI tools into his legal practice, but he stresses several caveats for his fellow practitioners and their clients.
AI is being used to save time and money, but its occasional “hallucinations” have made plenty of lawyers uneasy, while invented legal cases presented in court make occasional news headlines.
Then came a much-discussed ruling in a criminal case in the U.S. District Court in New York.
There, a defendant used the AI platform Claude to work out a legal strategy and then shared the notes with his lawyers. A federal judge shot down his claim of “attorney-client” privilege that would have shielded the notes from prosecutors’ prying eyes, saying the defendant abandoned confidentiality by enlisting an open-source platform.
“I think AI is a great tool,” Scheinkman told the Business Journal on March 6. “I use it basically on an everyday basis in my practice,” including producing written agreements.
“But it it’s really important to understand how to use it and how to use it in a matter where you are protecting confidences,” he adds.
Snell & Wilmer, Costa Mesa
His Phoenix-based firm Snell & Wilmer had 66 lawyers in its Costa Mesa office as of last month, ranking it No. 8 on this year’s Business Journal list of the largest OC lawyers by attorney headcount.
While the criminal case in New York may sound unusual, Scheinkman said that “it is a warning and it could happen in more ordinary business circumstances.”
He said one way to keep notes under the attorney-client privilege is to be sure that both the client and the lawyer are typing notes and strategies into “enterprise applications,” not open applications such as Claude.
Once there is no expectation of privacy, the attorney-client privilege vanishes, and the written notes become fair game for plaintiffs and prosecutors.
Then there is always the reality that AI is not infallible.
“Sometimes AI gets it wrong,” says Scheinkman, which is especially risky for someone without legal training. “Sometimes I will the run the same inquiry twice” or on different APPs.
“If it’s not used properly, you can get a lot of false positives,” says Scheinkman, who handles a variety of business transactions and corporate governance matters.
His advice to businesspeople: “Talk with your lawyer before you start using AI for legal matters.”
Scheinkman, who has lived and worked in Orange County since 1990, has run into clients who tend to trust machines over humans.
“It has to be right because this is what ChatGPT says, and it’s not right,” he recalls from some conversations.
He tells such clients: “It will cost you more to fix what you’ve given me than for me to generate the forms.”
As he summarizes the latest online tech advances: “The law struggles to catch up to technology.”
