What does AI actually do for us?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:My job as an attorney is uniquely unsuitable for AI, so I really never use it at work.

I use it occasionally to provide high level overviews of non-work topics. One of my kids has recurrent ear infections, so recently I asked Claude to give me an idea of the likely options will we have before his ENT appointment in a few weeks.

I'm an attorney as well and there are things AI can help you with. What kind of law do you practice?

I will often get incorrect or incomplete answers if I ask specific questions, but if you go in expecting that and push back it can be useful.

One thing it's great at is document review, for example.

I’m a prosecutor. Most of my job is conducting grand jury investigations. Grand jury materials, which include basically anything we receive pursuant to a subpoena, cannot go into AI.

You ought to be able to have access to internal AI options that don't leave your computer. I also deal with sensitive client information that I cannot put into Claude on my phone, but I do have access to Co Pilot and my firm's proprietary version of Chat GPT.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My job as an attorney is uniquely unsuitable for AI, so I really never use it at work.

I use it occasionally to provide high level overviews of non-work topics. One of my kids has recurrent ear infections, so recently I asked Claude to give me an idea of the likely options will we have before his ENT appointment in a few weeks.

I'm an attorney as well and there are things AI can help you with. What kind of law do you practice?

I will often get incorrect or incomplete answers if I ask specific questions, but if you go in expecting that and push back it can be useful.

One thing it's great at is document review, for example.

I’m a prosecutor. Most of my job is conducting grand jury investigations. Grand jury materials, which include basically anything we receive pursuant to a subpoena, cannot go into AI.

Wrong.

All your employer need do is to create a confidential AI system closed off to the outside.

They can easily make it secure, like our banking systems are.

I’m not wrong. It is my employer’s policy that grand jury materials cannot go into AI.

Tell me you don't understand AI without telling you don't understand AI.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:My employer is pushing hard for us to start using AI in our daily work. They've made investments in the IT aspect of it and now they are heavily investing in training us all in how to use it. But no one is clear on how exactly this can help us with even the most basic things, much less imagine how it will revolutionize anyting. Is this just me getting old and not knowing how this tool can improve things, or do the rest of you also not understand how this is supposed to increase our productivity and make our lives better?

AI is not meant to “make YOUR life better,” OP.

AI is meant to replace you. Meaning: you will not have your job soon.

If you have a position which can be done remotely, AI can do your job.

I work at a university and most departments have an administrator who makes a big deal every summer about updating the textbook orders -- making sure the syllabi and orders at the bookstore link to the latest edition of the textbook, making sure faculty know there is a new edition available, etc. Presumably there's also someone at the bookstore who makes a big deal out of this every summer too. Last week I was sent an excel spreadsheet and instructed to (as the instructor) make sure the edition listed was correct, and otherwise to update it to the correct ISBN, etc Instead of going to the publisher's website and checking all the stuff, I fed the whole darned spreadsheet to the AI, said "check that all of these textbooks have the correct edition, and if not, give the new ISBN, etc." Basically, the AI did the administrator's entire job for the month of June in like 10 minutes. As the administrator I would have then asked it to email all the faculty whose textbook has changed and inform them, etc. I have the feeling that the administrator whose job this currently is is NOT going to let anyone know you can feed the whole thing to an AI and do your month's long job in ten minutes. I'm sure this is true in many enterprises at the moment.

This is absolutely the case. I have some issues I work on that require the manipulation of large amounts of data, similar to what you're talking about. Some of the people in my group manually enter every line of this information, hence it takes them forever to do it. I wrote a quick and easy program that reads it all and then does what I need with it. I can do in 5 minutes what it would take them five days to do. But they enjoyed zoning out and entering this data so they don't want to change. The problem is, clients don't want to pay for that time anymore.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:My job as an attorney is uniquely unsuitable for AI, so I really never use it at work.

I use it occasionally to provide high level overviews of non-work topics. One of my kids has recurrent ear infections, so recently I asked Claude to give me an idea of the likely options will we have before his ENT appointment in a few weeks.

I'm an attorney as well and there are things AI can help you with. What kind of law do you practice?

I will often get incorrect or incomplete answers if I ask specific questions, but if you go in expecting that and push back it can be useful.

One thing it's great at is document review, for example.

I’m a prosecutor. Most of my job is conducting grand jury investigations. Grand jury materials, which include basically anything we receive pursuant to a subpoena, cannot go into AI.

Wrong.

All your employer need do is to create a confidential AI system closed off to the outside.

They can easily make it secure, like our banking systems are.

I’m not wrong. It is my employer’s policy that grand jury materials cannot go into AI.

That is a result of your employer's policy, though, not because it is not possible to make secure and confidential closed AI systems to input the information. If you trust your banking data and your health data to be online (or accept that it is online, at least), then there is no good reason why legal materials can't be online too. It is only a matter of time.

I'm a tax lawyer and deal with taxpayer information, which is similar in concept to grand jury materials in that it cannot be leaked to third parties. We have the kind of AI system the PP is talking about (we absolutely cannot use Chat GPT or Claude on our phones to input this information and we can't even access those sites on our laptops). Anyone who isn't investing in these ridiculous easy tools is wasting time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My job as an attorney is uniquely unsuitable for AI, so I really never use it at work.

I use it occasionally to provide high level overviews of non-work topics. One of my kids has recurrent ear infections, so recently I asked Claude to give me an idea of the likely options will we have before his ENT appointment in a few weeks.

I'm an attorney as well and there are things AI can help you with. What kind of law do you practice?

I will often get incorrect or incomplete answers if I ask specific questions, but if you go in expecting that and push back it can be useful.

One thing it's great at is document review, for example.

I feel like lawyers are the first thing AI could replace.

Can you expand on that? A lot of lawyers are litigators and they are in court all the time. I'm not sure how you think they'll be replaced.

I happen to operate in a very niche area that is luckily pretty immune for reasons I won't discuss and AI absolutely can be used to help with my job but it'll never be able to replace me.

Finally, a lot of practicing law involves gathering and arguing facts. While AI would be great about spitting out the relevant statutes, it's not very good at fact finding when that fact finding takes place via deposition - i.e. live questioning.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:My job as an attorney is uniquely unsuitable for AI, so I really never use it at work.

I use it occasionally to provide high level overviews of non-work topics. One of my kids has recurrent ear infections, so recently I asked Claude to give me an idea of the likely options will we have before his ENT appointment in a few weeks.

I'm an attorney as well and there are things AI can help you with. What kind of law do you practice?

I will often get incorrect or incomplete answers if I ask specific questions, but if you go in expecting that and push back it can be useful.

One thing it's great at is document review, for example.

I’m a prosecutor. Most of my job is conducting grand jury investigations. Grand jury materials, which include basically anything we receive pursuant to a subpoena, cannot go into AI.

Wrong.

All your employer need do is to create a confidential AI system closed off to the outside.

They can easily make it secure, like our banking systems are.

I’m not wrong. It is my employer’s policy that grand jury materials cannot go into AI.

That is a result of your employer's policy, though, not because it is not possible to make secure and confidential closed AI systems to input the information. If you trust your banking data and your health data to be online (or accept that it is online, at least), then there is no good reason why legal materials can't be online too. It is only a matter of time.

Maybe. There's still an open question about how Rule 6(e) applies here. You're oversimplifying, likely because you're not familiar with grand jury practice.

Rule 6(e) isn't any more important that 6103 or HIPAA or any other rule that requires keeping certain information confidential. My husband is a contractor for the Department of Defense and if you don't think they're using AI then you're sorely mistaken. As with every other program on certain computers, you can have secure versions of these AI programs, they're just local to your computer and not on chatGPT.com.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:OP, I'm reminded of when I was in 9th grade at my fancy private school, the school decided every classroom was going to have a computer. We were entering the computer age! The day came and the teachers stood around the boxes on their desk, saying what the heck do we do with this thing now? How can it ever possibly help us teach? Oh, ok, there's email, but, really, come on. I remember teachers laughing over it. That was 32 years ago. The rest is history.

AI is a powerful game changer in so many ways you don't recognize or see. It's a revolution in healthcare, especially when combined with robotics, it's helping to end deafness, it's helping to fight dementia, it's helping people understand their health better. It's revolutionizing defense and intelligence. And many more.

On a personal level, I use AI every day. I use AI to help throw together a dinner menu by feeding it a list of ingredients. The outcomes have been pretty good. I bake for pleasure and I've reworked recipes with AI's help to better understand what worked and why something didn't rise. I use AI to diagnose DIY projects and how to fix little repairs. All have been fantastic experiences. I upload photos of whatever needs fixing and it tells me exactly what to do. Saved me a fortune on expensive repair bills. I use AI to help plan for trips, proposing itineraries aligned with our interests.

I started using AI last year when my father was dying and it was giving me a much more realistic, direct, to the point diagnosis and prediction of his remaining life expectancy than anything we were being told by his team of health providers. Some of it is because humans need to be more cautious with their opinion, whereas AI is more direct, basically saying your father is going to die in 3-4 weeks whereas the doctors are more guarded. It allowed us to prepare for his death in a more meaningful way.

I also have conversations with AI about cultural war topics and political topics. Sometimes I have fun by engaging with Claude over philosophy and history and current events trends and sociological observations. I find the AI remarkably evenhanded and balanced, clearly refusing to endorse any extreme perspectives while acknowledging the existence of multiple viewpoints and explaining why people hold those views in a pragmatic, level-headed way. I do think many people would benefit from talking with the AI to better understand opposing views.

At work, my job involves a lot of writing and documents and reviewing and finalizing reports, gathering input across multiple sources (I work for a F500 consultancy, both as a seller and doer). I use AI as a document generation platform. I've used Claude to set up a program that combines different documents and feeds the essential information into a master draft, and then flags gaps. I've created customized prompts that are my assistants. It becomes a live working document and additional input and notes are fed into it. It identifies redundancies and fluff to eliminate and does it in 30 seconds whereas a year ago it'd take me a whole day of reading. It doesn't replace the writing but becomes part of it, you can say I've become a programmer too and it's a tool that allows me to manage a great deal more input that needs to go into a delivery report and flagging what is missing. It also advises on tone and style. It's also set up to capture client preferences and goals and pain points and tells me where my working draft falls short. It's been fabulous so far.

I'm not afraid of AI. I do see there can be challenges with unchecked AI, but my experience is that if you intelligently engage with AI, it delivers so many rewards that I find genuinely exciting and useful.

I made it halfway through the first paragraph.

I read it all. It was excellent. See some of us can engage meaningfully with AI AND keep our brains engaged and not full of mush or sound bytes. I don't agree or use AI exactly the same way but I align on some points.

But future generations wont be able to because youve been able to create and organize thoughts without AI you have your own INTELLIGENCE versus having to buy it from overlords in 10-20 years. Thanks so much for your service!

You do have a clear hostility towards AI. You should think about why you're so resistant and fearful.

This isn't about replacing my brain with blind faith in something else, any more than I had faith a book was accurate enough. I use AI as an intelligent tool to engage with and I learn from it. That's why I find it exciting, I'm constantly learning new things from the AI, whether a new program to help me do my work faster or how to repair the ice maker in my fridge or the underlying causes attracting certain people to certain politicians. It's interesting.

AI is the logical progression from the google search engine. But instead of having to filter through 20 links to find nuggets in each one that would help me find what I'm looking for, it synthesizes all of them into one direct output. It sifts through vast amount of information faster and pulls out what is relevant. It gives me more time to do other things. And the speed stimulates creativity in me instead of being bogged down in the process of research. It opens up new capacities in understanding things. That's why I've come to love it. But what you get out of the AI will be directly related to the effort you put into it and certainly you need to develop your tools and strategies for working with the AI and understanding its limitations and flaws and how to work around it or adjust for it.

Yes I do because its being implemented without any guardrails and those in charge of it have taken over our political system so theres no pushback. And AI is not perfect and its being presented as a final source without flaw. Its also xenophobic, perpetuates racial and economic issues, etc. Using it as a final source is the flaw in your approach. It doesnt seem to be in addition to approach because of the bolded.

If its deciding what is relevant then who is doing the thinking?

I don't think you have a very good understanding of how AI works.

No one is presenting AI as a final source without flaw. You literally won't find a single person who actively uses it who thinks like this (I'm not talking someone who used ChatGPT to figure out what time to get to the Disney parks for opening, I'm talking about people who are actually using it for work every day).

It's xenophobic, racist, etc. because of its source material. Why would you think searching someone on AI, which is pulling from all available sources, isn't going to be reflective of our society in general and our country's history?

Finally, YOU are the one telling it what is relevant, if you are using it correctly. I had Co Pilot sift through a large document for me yesterday. I asked for a specific group of items and it incorrectly included a similar and related but slightly different item so I corrected it.

AI is going to make dumb people dumber and smart people smarter. You decide which one you want to do.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:My job as an attorney is uniquely unsuitable for AI, so I really never use it at work.

I use it occasionally to provide high level overviews of non-work topics. One of my kids has recurrent ear infections, so recently I asked Claude to give me an idea of the likely options will we have before his ENT appointment in a few weeks.

I'm an attorney as well and there are things AI can help you with. What kind of law do you practice?

I will often get incorrect or incomplete answers if I ask specific questions, but if you go in expecting that and push back it can be useful.

One thing it's great at is document review, for example.

I’m a prosecutor. Most of my job is conducting grand jury investigations. Grand jury materials, which include basically anything we receive pursuant to a subpoena, cannot go into AI.

Wrong.

All your employer need do is to create a confidential AI system closed off to the outside.

They can easily make it secure, like our banking systems are.

I’m not wrong. It is my employer’s policy that grand jury materials cannot go into AI.

That is a result of your employer's policy, though, not because it is not possible to make secure and confidential closed AI systems to input the information. If you trust your banking data and your health data to be online (or accept that it is online, at least), then there is no good reason why legal materials can't be online too. It is only a matter of time.

Maybe. There's still an open question about how Rule 6(e) applies here. You're oversimplifying, likely because you're not familiar with grand jury practice.

You're correct, I am not, so I am sure there are nuances that I am totally ignorant to. But if we can manage to use AI despite strict HIPAA laws, of which I am very familiar, I would bet we'd be able to use it for grand jury information, we just need to wait for bureaucracy to catch up with things.

You're not ignorant, the PP you responded to is. Just a lawyer thinking they are more important than everyone else.

- lawyer

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My job as an attorney is uniquely unsuitable for AI, so I really never use it at work.

I use it occasionally to provide high level overviews of non-work topics. One of my kids has recurrent ear infections, so recently I asked Claude to give me an idea of the likely options will we have before his ENT appointment in a few weeks.

I'm an attorney as well and there are things AI can help you with. What kind of law do you practice?

I will often get incorrect or incomplete answers if I ask specific questions, but if you go in expecting that and push back it can be useful.

One thing it's great at is document review, for example.

I’m a prosecutor. Most of my job is conducting grand jury investigations. Grand jury materials, which include basically anything we receive pursuant to a subpoena, cannot go into AI.

Well there is a way to fix that, you can use a hosted ai in azure or aws with guardrails that don't let the information leave the boundary (this is in fact how Top secret and above use ai). There is no reason you can't use ai to have each grand jurey fill in a form of their info, load it in, then ask ai questions to determine if they are sutiable etc and also to conduct it. There shouldn't be any laws around that as long as you are intiatiing the discussion thing of AI as a way to load up documents information and do anlysis guided by you on it. However the future is for someone like you to build an ai bot that can do that in tandem so you can take on exponentially more cases.

The PP is talking about the information they have received for the grand jury. A grand jury is a secret trial where you determine if you have enough to move forward with a case against someone. That someone cannot know that there is a grand jury going on. Hence, the secrecy. But that information is no more secret than the information held by federal agencies, healthcare providers, defense contractors, etc.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:My job as an attorney is uniquely unsuitable for AI, so I really never use it at work.

I use it occasionally to provide high level overviews of non-work topics. One of my kids has recurrent ear infections, so recently I asked Claude to give me an idea of the likely options will we have before his ENT appointment in a few weeks.

I'm an attorney as well and there are things AI can help you with. What kind of law do you practice?

I will often get incorrect or incomplete answers if I ask specific questions, but if you go in expecting that and push back it can be useful.

One thing it's great at is document review, for example.

I’m a prosecutor. Most of my job is conducting grand jury investigations. Grand jury materials, which include basically anything we receive pursuant to a subpoena, cannot go into AI.

Wrong.

All your employer need do is to create a confidential AI system closed off to the outside.

They can easily make it secure, like our banking systems are.

I’m not wrong. It is my employer’s policy that grand jury materials cannot go into AI.

That is a result of your employer's policy, though, not because it is not possible to make secure and confidential closed AI systems to input the information. If you trust your banking data and your health data to be online (or accept that it is online, at least), then there is no good reason why legal materials can't be online too. It is only a matter of time.

Maybe. There's still an open question about how Rule 6(e) applies here. You're oversimplifying, likely because you're not familiar with grand jury practice.

You're correct, I am not, so I am sure there are nuances that I am totally ignorant to. But if we can manage to use AI despite strict HIPAA laws, of which I am very familiar, I would bet we'd be able to use it for grand jury information, we just need to wait for bureaucracy to catch up with things.

I read somewhere (I'm not a lawyer) that a lawyer used AI to help him clean up a brief and because he did that, he nullified attorney/client privilege. That's pretty concerning to anyone wanting to work with a lawyer.

Sigh. You don't understand how any of that works. Please don't repeat that story.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:My job as an attorney is uniquely unsuitable for AI, so I really never use it at work.

I use it occasionally to provide high level overviews of non-work topics. One of my kids has recurrent ear infections, so recently I asked Claude to give me an idea of the likely options will we have before his ENT appointment in a few weeks.

I'm an attorney as well and there are things AI can help you with. What kind of law do you practice?

I will often get incorrect or incomplete answers if I ask specific questions, but if you go in expecting that and push back it can be useful.

One thing it's great at is document review, for example.

I’m a prosecutor. Most of my job is conducting grand jury investigations. Grand jury materials, which include basically anything we receive pursuant to a subpoena, cannot go into AI.

Wrong.

All your employer need do is to create a confidential AI system closed off to the outside.

They can easily make it secure, like our banking systems are.

I’m not wrong. It is my employer’s policy that grand jury materials cannot go into AI.

That is a result of your employer's policy, though, not because it is not possible to make secure and confidential closed AI systems to input the information. If you trust your banking data and your health data to be online (or accept that it is online, at least), then there is no good reason why legal materials can't be online too. It is only a matter of time.

Maybe. There's still an open question about how Rule 6(e) applies here. You're oversimplifying, likely because you're not familiar with grand jury practice.

You're correct, I am not, so I am sure there are nuances that I am totally ignorant to. But if we can manage to use AI despite strict HIPAA laws, of which I am very familiar, I would bet we'd be able to use it for grand jury information, we just need to wait for bureaucracy to catch up with things.

I read somewhere (I'm not a lawyer) that a lawyer used AI to help him clean up a brief and because he did that, he nullified attorney/client privilege. That's pretty concerning to anyone wanting to work with a lawyer.

Right, because he probably used client identifiers or whatever the HIPAA equivalent is for lawyers, and didn't use a closed secure system. For example if I ever used a patient's name, DOB, etc when asking OpenEvidence to help me with something- like if I just copied and pasted lab data from their chart that included their name and asked Open Evidence to interpret it for me- that would be illegal.

The thing is - a brief is going to be a public document, so it wouldn't contain anything like that. That's also not how privilege works. But your point about your system stands - of course putting protected data into open source AI is a problem.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:My job as an attorney is uniquely unsuitable for AI, so I really never use it at work.

I use it occasionally to provide high level overviews of non-work topics. One of my kids has recurrent ear infections, so recently I asked Claude to give me an idea of the likely options will we have before his ENT appointment in a few weeks.

I'm an attorney as well and there are things AI can help you with. What kind of law do you practice?

I will often get incorrect or incomplete answers if I ask specific questions, but if you go in expecting that and push back it can be useful.

One thing it's great at is document review, for example.

I’m a prosecutor. Most of my job is conducting grand jury investigations. Grand jury materials, which include basically anything we receive pursuant to a subpoena, cannot go into AI.

Wrong.

All your employer need do is to create a confidential AI system closed off to the outside.

They can easily make it secure, like our banking systems are.

I’m not wrong. It is my employer’s policy that grand jury materials cannot go into AI.

That is a result of your employer's policy, though, not because it is not possible to make secure and confidential closed AI systems to input the information. If you trust your banking data and your health data to be online (or accept that it is online, at least), then there is no good reason why legal materials can't be online too. It is only a matter of time.

Maybe. There's still an open question about how Rule 6(e) applies here. You're oversimplifying, likely because you're not familiar with grand jury practice.

You're correct, I am not, so I am sure there are nuances that I am totally ignorant to. But if we can manage to use AI despite strict HIPAA laws, of which I am very familiar, I would bet we'd be able to use it for grand jury information, we just need to wait for bureaucracy to catch up with things.

I understand the Rule 6(e) concern, and I am not saying anyone should put grand jury material into ChatGPT or some public AI tool. That would obviously be reckless and probably prohibited by policy.

But I think people are confusing "public AI tools are not approved for this" with "AI can never be used for this." Those are very different claims.

The future version is not a prosecutor uploading grand jury materials into a consumer chatbot. The future version is a closed, government controlled AI environment, hosted in something like Azure Government, AWS GovCloud, or another approved secure environment, with no training on the data, no external disclosure, strict access controls, audit logs, retention rules, and use limited to authorized personnel performing official duties.

That is not some fantasy. Government already uses secure cloud systems for highly sensitive workloads, including health data, law enforcement data, financial data, and even classified workloads. So the issue is not whether AI can be made secure. It can. The issue is whether the agency has approved the system, written the policy, and structured the use correctly under Rule 6(e).

And the use case is not "AI replaces the prosecutor." The use case is AI as a force multiplier. It reviews subpoena returns, organizes records, builds timelines, flags inconsistencies, compares witness statements, finds missing documents, drafts witness outlines, and lets the prosecutor ask questions across a massive case file. The attorney still verifies everything, makes the legal judgments, controls the investigation, and decides what is presented.

That is where agents become the real multiplier. You could have one agent reviewing bank records, another organizing phone records, another summarizing subpoena returns, another checking witness statements against documents, another building timelines, another preparing issue lists, and another checking for gaps or contradictions. The prosecutor becomes the person directing and validating a team of AI assistants instead of manually grinding through every document the old way.

That is why I think this is inevitable. The current manual process is not some sacred legal principle. It is just the way things have been done because the tooling did not exist yet or was not approved yet. Once secure, compliant AI systems are adopted, attorneys who know how to use them will be able to handle far more evidence and far more cases than attorneys who refuse to learn the tools.

So yes, today your employer’s policy may prohibit it. That is completely fair. But long term, the answer is not "AI cannot work here." The answer is "we need a properly approved, closed, auditable AI system." And once that exists, the people still doing everything manually are going to be at a major disadvantage.

I never said “AI can never be used for this.” You (or rather, whatever AI spit out this response) are arguing with a straw man. I spend a lot of time looking for patterns in bank and other financial records and it would be great to have AI help with that.

You keep emphasizing security, but that’s not what Rule 6 is concerned with. Rule 6 isn’t HIPAA - it isn’t about secure storage of information. It is about maintaining the “black box” nature of the grand jury. It isn’t just the substance of the materials that matters; it is the fact that the government subpoenaed them in the first place.

You're totally missing the point. If you're using closed source AI on your computer IT IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE. You aren't storing it on any open platform. You can absolutely use a secure AI tool for your work and in fact you should be doing just that for your research. I would in a similar field and we use AI all the time to find information contained in large volumes of sensitive data.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:My job as an attorney is uniquely unsuitable for AI, so I really never use it at work.

I use it occasionally to provide high level overviews of non-work topics. One of my kids has recurrent ear infections, so recently I asked Claude to give me an idea of the likely options will we have before his ENT appointment in a few weeks.

I'm an attorney as well and there are things AI can help you with. What kind of law do you practice?

I will often get incorrect or incomplete answers if I ask specific questions, but if you go in expecting that and push back it can be useful.

One thing it's great at is document review, for example.

I’m a prosecutor. Most of my job is conducting grand jury investigations. Grand jury materials, which include basically anything we receive pursuant to a subpoena, cannot go into AI.

Wrong.

All your employer need do is to create a confidential AI system closed off to the outside.

They can easily make it secure, like our banking systems are.

I’m not wrong. It is my employer’s policy that grand jury materials cannot go into AI.

That is a result of your employer's policy, though, not because it is not possible to make secure and confidential closed AI systems to input the information. If you trust your banking data and your health data to be online (or accept that it is online, at least), then there is no good reason why legal materials can't be online too. It is only a matter of time.

Maybe. There's still an open question about how Rule 6(e) applies here. You're oversimplifying, likely because you're not familiar with grand jury practice.

You're correct, I am not, so I am sure there are nuances that I am totally ignorant to. But if we can manage to use AI despite strict HIPAA laws, of which I am very familiar, I would bet we'd be able to use it for grand jury information, we just need to wait for bureaucracy to catch up with things.

I understand the Rule 6(e) concern, and I am not saying anyone should put grand jury material into ChatGPT or some public AI tool. That would obviously be reckless and probably prohibited by policy.

But I think people are confusing "public AI tools are not approved for this" with "AI can never be used for this." Those are very different claims.

The future version is not a prosecutor uploading grand jury materials into a consumer chatbot. The future version is a closed, government controlled AI environment, hosted in something like Azure Government, AWS GovCloud, or another approved secure environment, with no training on the data, no external disclosure, strict access controls, audit logs, retention rules, and use limited to authorized personnel performing official duties.

That is not some fantasy. Government already uses secure cloud systems for highly sensitive workloads, including health data, law enforcement data, financial data, and even classified workloads. So the issue is not whether AI can be made secure. It can. The issue is whether the agency has approved the system, written the policy, and structured the use correctly under Rule 6(e).

And the use case is not "AI replaces the prosecutor." The use case is AI as a force multiplier. It reviews subpoena returns, organizes records, builds timelines, flags inconsistencies, compares witness statements, finds missing documents, drafts witness outlines, and lets the prosecutor ask questions across a massive case file. The attorney still verifies everything, makes the legal judgments, controls the investigation, and decides what is presented.

That is where agents become the real multiplier. You could have one agent reviewing bank records, another organizing phone records, another summarizing subpoena returns, another checking witness statements against documents, another building timelines, another preparing issue lists, and another checking for gaps or contradictions. The prosecutor becomes the person directing and validating a team of AI assistants instead of manually grinding through every document the old way.

That is why I think this is inevitable. The current manual process is not some sacred legal principle. It is just the way things have been done because the tooling did not exist yet or was not approved yet. Once secure, compliant AI systems are adopted, attorneys who know how to use them will be able to handle far more evidence and far more cases than attorneys who refuse to learn the tools.

So yes, today your employer’s policy may prohibit it. That is completely fair. But long term, the answer is not "AI cannot work here." The answer is "we need a properly approved, closed, auditable AI system." And once that exists, the people still doing everything manually are going to be at a major disadvantage.

I never said “AI can never be used for this.” You (or rather, whatever AI spit out this response) are arguing with a straw man. I spend a lot of time looking for patterns in bank and other financial records and it would be great to have AI help with that.

You keep emphasizing security, but that’s not what Rule 6 is concerned with. Rule 6 isn’t HIPAA - it isn’t about secure storage of information. It is about maintaining the “black box” nature of the grand jury. It isn’t just the substance of the materials that matters; it is the fact that the government subpoenaed them in the first place.

Fair point. Rule 6 is not just a security issue, and I should not have compared it too closely to HIPAA.

You are right that the secrecy issue includes the fact that certain records were subpoenaed at all, not just whether the records are stored securely.

My point is narrower: that does not mean AI can never be used. It means AI would have to be inside the authorized grand jury workflow, not treated like an outside public tool.

So the question is not just "is it secure?" The question is whether the AI system is approved, limited to authorized users, protected inside the secrecy wall, logged, and used only to assist the prosecutor.

That is where I think this is headed. AI for bank record review, pattern finding, timelines, and subpoena return organization could be incredibly useful, but only if it is built into the process legally and not used casually.

This is an AI response

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My job as an attorney is uniquely unsuitable for AI, so I really never use it at work.

I use it occasionally to provide high level overviews of non-work topics. One of my kids has recurrent ear infections, so recently I asked Claude to give me an idea of the likely options will we have before his ENT appointment in a few weeks.

I'm an attorney as well and there are things AI can help you with. What kind of law do you practice?

I will often get incorrect or incomplete answers if I ask specific questions, but if you go in expecting that and push back it can be useful.

One thing it's great at is document review, for example.

I feel like lawyers are the first thing AI could replace.

Funny, I used AI just this week to review a contract and I couldn’t believe how some glaring points eluded it (like the fact that regardless of the contract’s finer points, if a party misses payments, this materially affects enforceability. Kind of an essential poimt but since it wasn’t in the text, it simply didn’t bring that in.)

I have used it for early legal review in the past, bringing in counsel after I’ve gotten my bearings, and the human always had key knowledge that AI didn’t.

I have used AI a bunch for different things, and I’ve found it both incredibly intelligent and also spectacularly dumb. It’s such an uneven experience, it’s disorienting. So now I get what I can, which isn’t nothing, but I would neverrrr rely on it solely for anything legal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My job as an attorney is uniquely unsuitable for AI, so I really never use it at work.

I use it occasionally to provide high level overviews of non-work topics. One of my kids has recurrent ear infections, so recently I asked Claude to give me an idea of the likely options will we have before his ENT appointment in a few weeks.

I'm an attorney as well and there are things AI can help you with. What kind of law do you practice?

I will often get incorrect or incomplete answers if I ask specific questions, but if you go in expecting that and push back it can be useful.

One thing it's great at is document review, for example.

I’m a prosecutor. Most of my job is conducting grand jury investigations. Grand jury materials, which include basically anything we receive pursuant to a subpoena, cannot go into AI.

Wrong.

All your employer need do is to create a confidential AI system closed off to the outside.

They can easily make it secure, like our banking systems are.

I’m not wrong. It is my employer’s policy that grand jury materials cannot go into AI.

That is a result of your employer's policy, though, not because it is not possible to make secure and confidential closed AI systems to input the information. If you trust your banking data and your health data to be online (or accept that it is online, at least), then there is no good reason why legal materials can't be online too. It is only a matter of time.

Maybe. There's still an open question about how Rule 6(e) applies here. You're oversimplifying, likely because you're not familiar with grand jury practice.

You're correct, I am not, so I am sure there are nuances that I am totally ignorant to. But if we can manage to use AI despite strict HIPAA laws, of which I am very familiar, I would bet we'd be able to use it for grand jury information, we just need to wait for bureaucracy to catch up with things.

I read somewhere (I'm not a lawyer) that a lawyer used AI to help him clean up a brief and because he did that, he nullified attorney/client privilege. That's pretty concerning to anyone wanting to work with a lawyer.

Sigh. You don't understand how any of that works. Please don't repeat that story.

You'd have a lot more credibility if you yourself were able to understand and articulate what it was that I didn't understand.