There's no digital attorney-client privilege. If a lawyer uses LLM's on your behalf, the communications are protected. If you use the same LLM's on your own behalf, the chats are not protected.
replyDOJ could cut Z.ai off from US-based payment systems (Mastercard/Visa) if they don't comply with subpoenas.
They could, but generally it is expected that before a subpoena is complied with it is checked to be compatible with the laws of the country it’s in, and requires cooperation from that country. Most often they are ignored if there’s not a presence/entity/assets in the US.
replyIt’s also hard because no individual case would likely justify a move like that. It would have to be the sum of many, many cases.
Not every judge agrees with your statement of the law of privilege.
replyPlease link me to anyone pushing back against the precedent of US v. Heppner, S.D.N.Y. (2026). Would love to learn more! I'd rather not spout off on things that I'm not an expert on if I can help it, and I may have commented a bit fast above.
replyA key point of attorney-client privilege is that it's a feature of the legal system itself, not a technical or political hack.
replyMore like attorney-client liability
replyYou got it wrong. If courts and attorneys in the US can't run "discovery" on Z.ai servers or compel them to do anything, and if Chinese authorities don't cooperate with the US legal system as a matter of principle, then what you functionally have is super privilege.
replyThey'll just run discovery on you. If you try to respond to a subpoena with "the documents are outside the country and I won't give them to you," the judge will throw you in jail until you do.
replyYou're right on this point. But there are ways to build interfaces that sidestep this.
replyRun a sanitized VDI with no local storage --> offshore independent entity (e.g. a Hong Kong Company) that holds the AI service contract and API license --> GLM-Legal.
Somebody ought to set this up for pro se work.
Yeah sure but your clever sidestep is just "hiding evidence from the court." The kind of person that feels the need to have a secret AI lawyer is also probably going to just tank their case in another way.
replyYou should not trust any LLM to give you accurate legal advice. I can’t imagine all the ways that could go wrong.
replyLike pattern matching sentence algorithms many can reveal concepts and strategies to confirm independently
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