Your clients are already asking an AI. Give them one that's privileged.
A shared workspace under the engagement: the client's people, the firm's lawyers, the matters counsel choose to share, and an assistant that answers inside it. Counsel decide who is in the room and what the assistant may read, the provider keeps nothing, and every step is on record for the day someone asks whether privilege was waived.
The chat your client had with an AI last night is discoverable.
Clients paste the lease into a chatbot between calls. The courts, the vendors and the bar have each said what that means.
- The court
United States v. Heppner (S.D.N.Y., Feb. 2026)
A client used Claude on his own to work through his legal position. Judge Rakoff held the chats were neither privileged nor work product: the assistant is not an attorney, the provider's own policy disclaims confidentiality, and none of it was done at counsel's direction. The FBI had seized 31 of the conversations.
- The vendors
Consumer chats are kept, trained on, and produced.
OpenAI's CEO said in July 2025 that ChatGPT conversations have no legal privilege and that OpenAI would be required to produce them in a lawsuit. A federal court had already ordered OpenAI to preserve users' chat logs, deleted ones included, for the New York Times case. Anthropic's consumer terms let Claude Free, Pro and Max chats train its models, with retention up to five years.
- The bar
ABA Formal Opinion 512 (July 2024)
Before client information touches a generative AI tool, the lawyer must understand whether the tool retains or trains on it, and must get informed consent where it might. The duty is the lawyer's, whichever tool the client picks up.
Privileged by construction.
Privilege is determined by who was in the room, what the data was used for, and whether it was supervised by an attorney. Privileged Circles ensure all three, for every action, with strict guardrails.
- 01Tool ownership
The AI is the attorney's tool, not the client's.
- Client explicitly acknowledges the channel is for legal advice from their counsel.
- Counsel can steer the AI to ensure advice is determined based on their expertise.
- An attorney sees every exchange and can confirm, correct, or add to AI answers.
- 02Independent tool
Never commingled with non-legal purposes.
- A circle is its own, temporary, workspace for a clear purpose.
- Legal questions are never commingled with ordinary business questions.
- 03AI Permissions
The AI is completely sandboxed.
- The AI only has access to matters counsel shared into that chat.
- The AI cannot accidentally leak information through forum posts or rogue messaging outside our servers.
- 04Data sharing
Data is never shared with third parties.
- We do not have a "help us improve" button, so clients can't accidentally click it.
- A notice is always displayed alongside privileged data to note it is privileged and confidential.
- Data is never inspected by humans, stored on external servers, or used for training.
- 05Proof of usage and purpose
Audit logs prove access and sharing.
- Downloadable audit log records every invite, approval, share, post, and deletion.
- Logs prove provenance during discovery to strengthen the case for privilege.
Capabilities
Give clients a privileged place to ask the AI.
- AI answers in the thread, citing the section of the shared document it read
- Attorney confirms, corrects, or adds a document under every answer, expanding billable work
- Counsel set the AI's standing instructions, so it is an extension of their advice
- Users can determine what each chat sees from the shared documents in the circle
- Create new chats or continue in existing threads, with the most capable models
- Client seats, one-click invite, approve, and remove, downloadable audit log
Before you ask.
How do I start?
Request a demo. We set up your workspace, open the first circle with a client of your choice, and run the first document together.
What does it cost?
$95 per lawyer seat and $55 per client seat, per month billed annually. Client seats are added on top of lawyer seats. For law firms.
Does the software make a communication privileged?
No software does; the engagement does. What a circle does is refuse to break the elements courts test. Only counsel-approved people are in it, the channel exists for legal advice and the client acknowledges that before their first post, privilege on a matter is extended only by a lawyer's act, and the audit log, the notice on every surface and undo-send are the reasonable steps a firm can show it took.
What does the AI provider see?
Only the matters in the chat's scope, and it keeps none of it. Every circle model call carries a do-not-store instruction to a provider under a zero-data-retention agreement; without that attestation the circle chat refuses to send anything and says so. The assistant has no search or fetch tool, so nothing in a circle reaches the internet.
Do my clients need a subscription?
Not their own. Each person you invite takes a client seat at $55 per month, billed annually to the firm, and never needs a lawyer seat. Client seats are not included in lawyer seats.
What can a client see?
Only the circles they belong to, and in each one only what counsel shared. The firm sees every circle. Permissions and the audit log belong to the firm.
Where does my data go?
Documents are encrypted in transit and at rest. Access follows your permissions, every AI action is recorded in the audit log, and we hold data processing agreements with the AI providers we use.
Can I buy it alone?
Yes, for law firms. Privileged Circles is sold on its own, per seat.
See it on your deals.
A working session with your documents, your deal points, your counterparties.