Don’t type your questions about your family case into ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI tool.
Attorney-client privilege is what makes it safe to tell your lawyer the whole, complicated, messy truth. Normally, what you say to us stays between us. In other words, a judge won’t make us reveal it to your ex or their attorney. Your ability speak to speak freely with us allows you to get real advice instead of guarded half-answers.
Privilege only covers communications with your lawyer and legal team. It does not cover a chatbot. The moment you type your situation into a public AI tool, you’ve told a third party, not your attorney. That means attorney-client privilege is broken, and what you fed into the chatbot may well become fair game in your case. If the other side issues a subpoena to ChatGPT or Claude — especially after a recent court case — they may well just hand over the chatlogs.
Here’s a hypothetical so you can see what that might look like during a divorce.
Say you’re frustrated one night and type into a chatbot: “My spouse doesn’t know that I opened a savings account and funded it with my bonus. How do I avoid disclosing it in my divorce?”
That exchange is now sitting on a server you don’t control and is not confidential or protected by the privilege. (As opposed to in your lawyer’s notebook which is.) If your sworn financial disclosure later omits that savings account, the chat log doesn’t just show the asset existed. It also shows you knew the account it might need to be disclosed, and asked how to hide It.
All of a sudden your problems may have become much bigger than the value of that one account.
Here’s another way this might play out.
Say you’ve started seeing someone and you’re not sure how it affects your alimony. Rather than ask your lawyer, you type into a chatbot: “I started dating someone three months after separating. Does this affect my alimony if we move in together?”
Now that exchange is now sitting on a server you don’t control and is not confidential or protected by the privilege. (As opposed to in an email to your lawyer who could give you actual advice based on your situation and Connecticut law.)and it is not protected. If alimony becomes contested later, the chat log doesn’t just confirm you’re dating. It shows the timeline in your own words, and it shows you were already thinking about how it might affect your support. That’s no longer a private choice about your life. It’s a document the other side can use to argue about support, and it can take a case that was cooperative and turn it acrimonious fast. Sometimes the bigger cost isn’t the legal argument. It’s what it does to the temperature of the whole case.
Nothing you type into a public AI tool is private, either way. These platforms store what you enter. Some use it to train their systems. Some allow it to be reviewed by people who are not you.
As I mentioned, a federal court has already ruled on this. Conversations with public AI chatbots are not protected by any privilege. The court ordered someone to turn over their full chat history because they had used it to discuss their legal situation. Family law attorneys expect the same reasoning to apply to divorce and custody cases.
We also cannot begin to tell you how bad AI is at understanding Connecticut law … let alone applying It correctly to your situations. We have seen a chatbot explain, with complete confidence and incorrect citations, that Connecticut is a community property state. (It is not.) We have seen it tell a someone there was no chance they would get alimony. (They did.) AI is dangerous because what you tell it can come out in your case. AI is also dangerous because what it tells you might well be dead wrong.
Bring your questions to your lawyer directly.