Heppner AI privilege ruling: governed claim lifecycle

A public proofcase showing initial admission and refusal, named-condition reopening, revised governed state, and separate structural recomputation.

2. Supported proposition

The court ruled that Heppner's AI Documents were protected by neither attorney-client privilege nor the work product doctrine. The court concluded that Claude was not an attorney and treated that fact as sufficient to defeat Heppner's attorney-client privilege claim. The work-product ruling rested in part on the AI Documents not being prepared by or at the behest of counsel and not reflecting counsel's strategy.

3. Source

3 supported claims drawing on 1 source, beginning with United States v. Heppner, document 27. Read the sources.

4. Refusal boundary

This record does not establish a general rule that using an AI assistant defeats privilege in every case; that broader proposition was considered and refused. Read why.

5. History and edition

Edition 2, released 2026-07-12. Full history.

6. Machine projection

Page-model JSON · Portable export bundle

Browse every admitted record →

Ungoverned vs. governed — One question about the Heppner ruling, answered two ways: an authored illustration of ungoverned failure modes beside the real admitted claims, refusal, and receipt.

Refusals — Inspect what governed records declined to admit, why each candidate was refused, which branches may be reconsidered, and which are terminal.

Public explainer for the Governed Analytical Records Protocol.

GARP governs whether analytical material becomes a durable governed record at all, by separating drafting, review, promotion, revision, dispute, and publication into visible states with explicit transitions between them. GARPedia is the public read surface for records produced under that protocol.

What this site covers

GARPedia describes how analytical material becomes a governed record, why retrieval is treated as a separate operation from publication, and how sources, captures, fragments, claims, candidate records, and evidence packs relate to one another inside the protocol. It walks through the review actions that gate every promotion, the revision and dispute mechanisms that operate on existing records, and the withdrawal path that retires records without erasing their lineage.

It also documents how the same primitives appear across Counterpose, GARP Rubric, ARCS Anchor, Legal File, Research Corpus, and other profiles, and how each profile configures admission, review, and publication for its own domain.

Read about the protocol See systems built on it