Answers · Your case & AI
Before You Tell an AI Chatbot About Your Accident Case, Read This
A federal court has now ruled that conversations with AI chatbots are not privileged, not confidential, and can be obtained by the other side and used against you. If you are in a lawsuit, expecting one, or dealing with an insurance claim, what you type into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any similar tool may become evidence.
It is completely understandable why people do it. You have been hurt. You have questions at midnight when no lawyer is answering the phone. The chatbot is free, it answers instantly, and typing into that little box feels exactly like a private conversation.
It is not one. And a federal judge in New York just made that official.
The ruling
In February 2026, Judge Jed Rakoff of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York decided United States v. Heppner, what appears to be the first federal ruling in the country directly addressing whether conversations with an AI chatbot are protected by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine.
The answer was no. On both.
The facts should make anyone with a pending legal matter sit up. The defendant, a financial executive under federal investigation, had already hired an experienced law firm to defend him. He then used a consumer AI chatbot to research legal questions about the investigation, and he fed information he had learned from his own defense lawyers into the tool, generating dozens of documents of prompts and responses. Prosecutors sought those documents. The court let them have them.
The reasoning matters for everyone, not just criminal defendants:
An AI tool is not a lawyer. No attorney-client relationship can exist between a person and a chatbot. The privilege that protects what you tell your lawyer simply never attaches to what you tell a machine, no matter how legal the conversation feels.
You have no reasonable expectation of confidentiality. The platforms’ own terms permit collection and use of what you type. A conversation you have knowingly shared with a technology company is not a confidential one in the eyes of the law.
Worse: you can lose protection you already had. This is the part people miss. When the defendant typed his lawyers’ advice into the chatbot, the court treated that as a voluntary disclosure to a third party that waived the privilege over that information. Telling the AI what your lawyer told you is legally similar to reading your lawyer’s advice aloud to a stranger. The protection your attorney’s advice carried can evaporate the moment you paste it into a prompt.
And a paid subscription changes none of this. The court’s reasoning applied to the consumer product regardless of whether the user paid for it.
What this means in a personal injury case
Heppner was a criminal case, but its logic applies squarely to civil litigation, including the auto negligence and insurance cases I handle. Consider what people routinely type into chatbots after a collision:
- Descriptions of how the crash happened, including details and doubts they have never told anyone
- Candid statements about their injuries: what genuinely hurts, what has improved, what they can and cannot do
- Questions that presume facts: “was it partly my fault if I was looking at my phone”
- What their lawyer told them, pasted in for a “second opinion”
- Settlement numbers, negotiation strategy, what they would really accept
- Frustrations, exaggerations, and thinking-out-loud that reads very differently on paper
Every line of that is potentially discoverable. In litigation, the defense can request your relevant documents and communications, and courts have already ordered the production of AI chat logs when they are relevant to the case. A candid 2 a.m. conversation with a chatbot about whether your neck really hurts as much as you claimed at your deposition is exactly the kind of document a defense lawyer dreams about.
And understand what discovery obligations mean once a case is underway: those chat logs may be evidence you are required to preserve. Deleting them after litigation is reasonably anticipated is not a solution: destroying relevant evidence is spoliation, and courts punish it severely, sometimes more severely than whatever the deleted material said.
The illusion of privacy is the whole problem
The interface is designed to feel like a conversation. Conversations feel private. But legally, typing into a chatbot is closer to writing a letter and handing a copy to a technology company than it is to talking with a lawyer, a doctor, or a spouse.
Those three get privileges because the law has decided those relationships deserve protection. Your relationship with a software product enjoys no such protection, and no privacy setting, incognito mode, or subscription tier creates one. The Heppner court left open only the possibility that enterprise-grade tools operating under strict confidentiality agreements, used at a lawyer’s direction, might someday be treated differently. That is not the app on your phone.
What is actually safe
To be clear about what this article is not saying: there is nothing wrong with using AI to learn about the law in general. Asking a chatbot “what is Michigan’s no-fault system” or “what does serious impairment of body function mean” involves no facts about you. General legal education is what these tools are reasonably good at, and reading about the law puts nothing at risk.
The line is specifics. The moment the conversation turns to your crash, your injuries, your fault, your lawyer’s advice, or your settlement thinking, you are creating a written record about your case with no legal protection around it.
A simple test before you hit enter: would you be comfortable if the insurance company’s lawyer read this aloud at your deposition? Because that is now a realistic destination for it.
Where your candor is actually protected
Here is the thing the chatbot cannot offer at any price: privilege.
What you tell your lawyer, in confidence, for the purpose of getting legal advice, is protected by one of the oldest and strongest shields in the law. That protection exists precisely so you can be completely honest, about the bad facts, the doubts, and the mistakes, and get real advice based on the truth. Your lawyer cannot help you around a problem they do not know exists, and the privilege is what makes telling them safe.
The midnight questions are real, and they deserve real answers. Write them down. Bring them to your lawyer. Every one of them will be answered inside a conversation the other side can never touch.
The machine answers instantly. The lawyer answers confidentially. In a lawsuit, only one of those matters.
Talk to someone about your case
I am a Michigan and Ohio trial attorney handling auto negligence and no-fault cases. If you have questions about a collision, an injury, or an insurance claim (including questions you have already asked a chatbot), bring them to a conversation the law actually protects. The consultation is free, and it is confidential in a way no AI conversation is.
This article discusses the law as of July 2026 and is general information, not legal advice. It does not create an attorney-client relationship. The law governing AI communications and discovery is developing rapidly, courts in other jurisdictions may reach different conclusions, and outcomes depend on the specific facts of each case. Attorney advertising. Gary Safir is a trial lawyer at Morgan & Morgan’s Detroit office.