Privilege & confidentiality
“Am I risking privilege by using this?”
It is the question every barrister has to settle before client material goes anywhere near an AI tool — and most are left to settle it alone. This page does the analysis in plain English: what actually happens to your material, why that sits within the rules you already practise under, and what sensible use looks like.
What actually happens
Your material, traced end to end.
Four facts, each describing how Barrister AI runs in production today. The security page sets out the full controls — this is the part that matters for the privilege analysis.- 01
It goes to a model provider, under contract
When you run research or ask a question of a brief, your material travels over an encrypted connection to an AI model provider, under commercial terms that bind it to confidentiality. That is the same legal architecture as the providers your practice already runs on: your email host, your cloud document store, your chambers' IT.
- 02
It isn't kept long — or at all
Your material is held by the provider for a bounded window at most — 30 days on standard research, then deleted — and brief and document analysis stores nothing once the response is returned. A zero-data-retention research mode is available on every Pro plan for your most sensitive matters.
- 03
It trains nothing
Nothing you research, upload or draft is used to train any AI model. Not as a setting you have to find and switch off — as the standing arrangement with our model providers, applying to every request, on every tier.
- 04
Nobody browses your work
Our own staff work against pseudonymous references, with your identity held separately from your activity. Joining the two back together requires a specific, logged reason through an audit-logged path. There is no screen where someone can casually see whose work is whose.
The professional rules
You already work this way.
None of this analysis is new. It is the same analysis barristers run every time client material passes through a provider — because it always does.Confidential disclosure to a provider is ordinary practice.
Barristers hand client material to service providers under confidentiality every working day: chambers IT, transcription, cloud document storage, the email system every brief passes through. Your professional rules have always accommodated that — disclosure to a provider, for the purposes of your engagement, under confidentiality, is not a breach of the duty. Barrister AI stands in exactly that line.
Privilege survives it.
Privilege is waived by acting inconsistently with the confidentiality of a communication — showing it to the other side, or to the world. Confidential disclosure to a service provider bound to keep it confidential is not that. Emailing a brief through your email provider does not waive privilege over it; putting the same material through Barrister AI, on the terms above, is the same analysis.
The AI guidance asks three questions — each has an answer here.
The guidance issued to Australian barristers on AI tools comes down to three demands. Know where your data goes: to model providers under confidentiality contracts, set out on our security page. Don't use tools that train on it: nothing here trains on your work, on any tier. Stay in control of it: a 30-day retention window at most, a zero-data-retention mode for when nothing may be retained, deletion on request — and no staff browsing in between.
Emailing a brief doesn’t waive privilege. Confidential processing under contract is the same analysis.
In practice
Sensible practice.
The habits that keep the analysis simple — most of them the habits a careful practice has already.Do
- Use the zero-data-retention mode for your most sensitive matters. It is available on every Pro plan, and the confidentiality terms are otherwise identical.
- Satisfy yourself once, properly. Read this page and the security page the way you read your cloud provider's terms when your practice moved to the cloud — then file the analysis.
- Where a name adds nothing to the legal question, leave it out. Not because the tool needs it removed — because minimisation costs nothing.
Avoid
- Don't paste client material into consumer AI tools that train on what you type. That is the practice the guidance is actually warning about — and it is a different thing from this.
- Don't rely on any tool whose retention terms you cannot state.
- Don't outsource judgment. What you advise and what you file remain yours; the tool extends your reach, it does not sign your name.
This page is reassurance, not advice. It explains in plain English how Barrister AI handles your material and how that maps onto the professional framework barristers practise under — it is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for your own judgment in a particular matter. Where a matter carries obligations beyond the ordinary — statutory secrecy, suppression orders, national security — apply the care those already demand.
Privilege & confidentiality