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Health Care Law Section Co-Chairs: RebeccaSiviglia – MoffittCancerCenter & DaniellaLee – EpsteinBeckerGreen
Artificial intelligence( AI) tools are rapidly becoming embedded in legal and business workflows, offering efficiencies in drafting, research, and analysis. At the same time, their use has raised significant and evolving questions regarding attorney-client privilege and work-product protection. Recent court decisions underscore that privilege does not automatically extend to AI-assisted materials and, in some circumstances, may be waived altogether.
In United States v. Heppner, Bradley Heppner, an executive charged with securities and wire fraud, used Anthropic’ s consumer AI chatbot, Claude, to generate over 30 documents related to his
anticipated criminal defense. Heppner independently input information he learned from his legal counsel into the AI tool, generated reports outlining defense strategies, and shared these documents with his attorneys. Opposing counsel moved to compel production of the reports and sought to use the documents at trial. Heppner argued that the documents were protected by attorney-client privilege or, alternatively, the work-product doctrine because they reflected legal strategy and were created for the purpose of consulting counsel. On February 10, 2026, the court rejected Heppner’ s arguments in a bench
Takentogether, heppner and warner now functionasthe benchmarksfor analyzingaiusein relationtoattorneyclientprivilegeandthe work-productdoctrine. ruling and held that the AI-generated documents were neither privileged nor protected work product.
The ruling emphasized several key principles. First, attorney-client privilege did not apply because the AI tool was not a lawyer and was not engaged by counsel to assist in providing legal advice. Second, by voluntarily disclosing information to a third-party platform that did not guarantee confidentiality, Heppner arguably waived privilege. Third, the court rejected the notion of retroactive privilege, reiterating
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