Posts Archive
Technical and litigation notes
WhatsApp Legal Advice — Professional Conduct and UPL
the WhatsApp AI agent provides legal information — case status, hearing dates, procedure explanations — via WhatsApp. The line between legal information and legal advice is the line between tool and practice of law. Where exactly that line falls varies by jurisdiction and evolves with AI capability.
AI Governance & RegulationLegal SaaS Vendor Risk for Law Firms
Law firms are bound by professional conduct rules when selecting third-party software. Using a SaaS platform for client data processing without adequate due diligence is a professional conduct risk. This post provides a due diligence framework and addresses the data continuity question that most firms ignore: what happens to your clients' data if the vendor goes out of business?
Data Privacy & GDPRLegal Data Retention and Destruction
Legal file retention requirements (typically 7-10 years post-matter closure in most jurisdictions) conflict directly with GDPR's right to erasure. A client who requests erasure of their data from a legal SaaS platform cannot override the law firm's professional retention obligations. Managing this conflict requires careful categorisation of what data is subject to which obligation.
Legal Tech & Professional EthicsBilling Rate Transparency and Fee Agreements
A billing rate hierarchy that resolves automatically creates legal and ethical risks when rates change without client notification. Fee agreements must accurately describe the rate resolution logic. Automated retainer deductions must match the written fee agreement.
Legal Tech & Professional EthicsTime Billing Software and Professional Conduct Rules
Bar association model rules require that billing be accurate, transparent, and not deceptive. Automated time tracking software introduces new questions: can a timer running in the background generate a billable entry? Who is responsible when an AI suggests a time entry? What is the lawyer's duty to review before billing?
Legal Tech & Professional EthicsLegal Software and Professional Privilege
Attorney-client privilege attaches to communications made in confidence for the purpose of legal advice. Legal SaaS platforms store these communications. When the platform is breached, when vendor staff access client data, or when the platform is subpoenaed — the privilege question becomes acute.
AI Governance & RegulationChatbot Appointment Setting — Consumer Rights
An appointment set by an AI chatbot is a representation made on behalf of the business. Whether it creates a binding contract, what disclosure is required, and what cancellation rights the consumer holds depends on the jurisdiction, the nature of the appointment, and the clarity of the chatbot's authority.
Data Privacy & GDPRLocal LLM vs Cloud LLM — The Privacy Tradeoff
Choosing Ollama over a cloud LLM API means conversation data never transits a third-party network. For a platform handling sensitive business conversations — sales negotiations, legal matters, HR discussions — this is a significant data protection advantage. But local inference is not a privacy guarantee by itself.
Data Privacy & GDPRRAG Systems and Copyright
A RAG pipeline ingests documents, chunks them, and stores vector embeddings permanently. Three legal questions arise: who owns the copyright in the ingested content, what happens when the retrieval reproduces copyrighted text verbatim, and what does a GDPR erasure request require when the "data" is a vector embedding?