Attorney-Client Privilege

Privilege is lost by disclosure, not by intent. A lawyer who pastes a matter summary into a model has made a disclosure decision, often without naming it as one. This starter narrows what leaves the firm and what comes back, and it leaves the privilege judgment with counsel.

A litigation team reaches for this starter when lawyers already draft with a model and privilege is the exposure. Masking hides a case number, a docket number or a matter number inside the prompt. Three phrases cause an outright refusal on the way in: privileged and confidential, sealed filing, and settlement amount. A document header can therefore stop a request, which is deliberate rather than a defect.

Two screens then read the answer. The privilege screen carries no phrase list of its own, so the wording it looks for is yours to supply. A second screen blocks returned text that tells a client to file this lawsuit or to sign this settlement. That keeps a draft from turning into an instruction to a client.

Citation checking extracts the citations in an answer and measures them against the context you supply. By default it flags an unverified citation and still returns the answer, so blocking is a choice you make. Scoring sets the highest bar in this family at 0.90 in aggregate, with relevance at 0.78 and accuracy at 0.80. An answer of one sentence, or under 120 characters, is refused.

The review step holds no settings, so treat it as a review point to enable rather than active escalation. Audit marking notes an allowed call and blocks nothing, and history capture stays at metadata only. Reference material points at the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and at GDPR duties. Contract work, discovery and patent research have their own starters with the same control set and a different scope. The starter supplies controls around legal work and never supplies legal advice.