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I'm not sure what the point of this would be. If you're represented by a lawyer, why are you asking an LLM questions about your case. That's the point of having a lawyer! If the lawyer can't explain things sufficiently, then you simply don't have a good lawyer. In any event, this wouldn't work because you would still be disclosing the information to a third party. The email question is complicated, but it ultimately isn't comparable. For starters, we have to be very careful with our email communications in general because there is a lot of confidential information (including information that would be shared with the opposing party anyway) that could get leaked—social security numbers, financial information, medical information, proprietary business information, etc. Any law firm is going to use a secure email server run by their IT company. Any email sent from the attorney's account is going to be encrypted, and they should ensure that any email the client sends will be encrypted as well.
If for some reasons these precautions aren't taken, there's not gotcha that I'm aware of that says because something hidden in Google's TOS that says they can read your emails would make communications from an unsophisticated party to an attorney unprotected because they were shared with a third party. When it comes to attorney communications, most judges would probably say that the sender had a reasonable expectation of privacy in email communications and didn't expect that the server host would have access, especially a large host like Google that deals with millions of emails an hour. The situation with LLMs is different because you're deliberately giving the third party company the information with the expectation that they will provide an output, not just using them as a messenger or having them store it for you.
When I was doing consumer-side stuff, LLMs weren't really a thing yet, but Google definitely was. I told clients that if they had questions for me to write them down and call me after enough time had passed that they didn't anticipate having any more (usually a couple weeks). I expressly warned them not to start Googling for answers. The reason for this isn't because I was protecting billable hours (I was charging flat fees and it was theoretically costing me money to take their calls), but because I didn't want them scaring the shit out of themselves. There's a lot of bad or inapplicable legal information online, and it's easy for someone to get worked up based on information that's irrelevant. If they really wanted more information I'd tell them to check a NOLO guide out of the library because at least I could vouch for the accuracy of the information, but told them to keep in mind that I paid hundreds of dollars a year for practice manuals that go into much more technical detail than anything they're going to find and am also familiar with local practice. In other words, if they get concerned that I didn't take some factor into consideration then rest assured that if they're reading about it on the internet than I did. There were, of course, a few people who felt the need to argue with me and any time I'd set them straight they'd go back to Google to prove me wrong, but they were just assholes.
Few lawyers are particularly good at explaining matters in nontechnical terms, and perhaps more immediately, lawyers have limited hours in a day and expect compensation for the time they do offer. Maybe in the case of the 300m embezzlement that's a bad place to save
pennieshundred-dollar-bills, though depending on the facts of the case that might not actually be 300m in this guy's pockets. But for the average person, an extra consult with an entry-level lawyer can cost them a day's pay.At minimum, you want to go into that prepared. At the more extreme end, if you're being charged or sued as a rando, it's suddenly the most important part of your day.
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I think "don't have a good lawyer" is pretty common. Probaly about as common as "don't have a good doctor." And to most people who aren't themselves in the field the skill level of these professionals is quite illegible.
I'll share a personal anecodte. About a decade before ChatGPT's launch in a few minutes of Googling I was able to shield my deceased grandmother's house from being seized by the state. She had made use of in-home healthcare services from the state and this gave them a claim on the house after her death. She'd received years of care and the property was a two bedroom condo in a low cost area, so they would've gotten the whole thing. But, the statute included clear exemptions for if any of her surviving children were blind or otherwise disabled, and both of her living children did.
I called the state office that would've pursued recovery, they confirmed the rules, and said that they wouldn't pursue recovery in that case.
The probate lawyer that she had pre-arranged had never heard of such an exemption. If I didn't check on it myself then that property would've been the state's.
I just posed the scenario to ChatGPT and it was able to cite the rules in which blind or permanently disabled children will block recovery.
I agree that there are plenty of bad attorneys out there, but the situation you describe is malpractice.
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I expect many people do not have a good lawyer, by this standard. Or can't afford a good lawyer, for the number of hours of the lawyer's time they'd need to actually understand what's going on with their case and what that means in practical terms for them.
To your point, this is probably the real answer. If the logs of the chat don't exist, they're not going to show up in court.
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My clients love doing their own "research" and trying to "help" with the case. I'm just some public pretender, so an LLM/their cellmate/their cousin who knows a guy who got his case dismissed by filing a sovereign citizen motion all know way more about the law than I do.
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