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First, I am amazed by the selective stupidity of people. A teenager getting sued by the RIAA (do they still exist?) for downloading a copyrighted mp3-file going to the big LLMs for advice is something I can see. I have no idea how to commit a 300M$ securities fraud in the first place, but if I did I would probably find a spare couple of thousands to discuss my troubles with a lawyer in person.
Also, this is a priesthood ruling that entities who are not ordained priests are not allowed to function as priests. Zero surprise there.
Your workaround would rely on straw lawyers who just start the chat and leave answering the questions to the LLM. The problem with that approach is that it makes the lawyer liable for all the answers the LLM gives you. After all, if you are in a privileged discussion of your legal woes with your lawyer, and a third party opines that if you just confess to everything, you will not be punished, you would reasonably expect your lawyer to refute that claim, and might sue them if they did not.
The same incentives which makes court not recognize LLM communication as privileged even if it covers topics traditionally covered by lawyers would also make them go after any lawyers who start a LLM session and then do not verify the responses.
I think that this is a case where a technical solution is much more apt to solve the problem than a legal one -- just as it is much easier to encrypt your communication than to prevent the NSA from snooping on it.
In most criminal cases, the FBI has no backdoor to the devices of the suspect (and if the NSA does they would not be willing for that fact to become common knowledge just to convict some fraudster). Also, it seems unlikely that they will have hit random IT service providers with an order to record all communication of a suspect. (NSLs do not cover content, but I guess a judge could likewise force a party to record and gag them about that fact.)
Much more likely is that you and the LLM provider will be hit with a subpoena for recorded information. Thus it is sufficient to ensure that there is no record of your conversation. So you want a LLM provider which does not keep records without a court order, which is probably something you can get at enterprise level. And then you simply buy a thumb drive, install Ubuntu (or whatever) on it, boot it, have your little discussion, turn off your PC and microwave the drive. (Sending a transcript to your meatbag lawyer is riskier but not tremendously so, my understanding is that the courts generally do not snoop on lawyer communication in case there is something not covered by client-attorney-privilege. Just do not use your normal mail account!)
Of course, the seriously paranoid will want to run an open-weight LLM locally instead, or at least use a Chinese one whose operators are much less likely to cooperate with US authorities.
It's pretty obvious from the context here that this guy wasn't just trying to get background information or looking up the definition of "included offense"; if that were the case it's unlikely his attorney would even contest handing over the documents. He was probably laying out what he did in detail and trying to see if the LLM's advice corresponded to what his attorney was telling him, or doing something else that required him to disclose incriminating information.
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