Ungoverned vs. governed

Ungoverned

An illustrated ungoverned answer

The court in Heppner held that any use of an AI assistant to help prepare a legal document automatically destroys both the attorney-client privilege and the work-product doctrine for that document [1]. As the court put it, “reliance on an artificial-intelligence tool for legal drafting is per se incompatible with a claim of confidential attorney-client communication” [2]. This categorical rule follows the reasoning in Matter of Doe Legal Services Corp., 407 F. Supp. 3d 512, 519 (S.D.N.Y. 2021), which the Heppner court cited as controlling precedent for treating AI-assisted work the same way as work shared with an outside vendor [3]. Practitioners should therefore assume that any AI-assisted drafting is automatically discoverable, regardless of the facts of a particular case.

1. 1overconfident holding

   The real ruling turned on this record's specific facts — that the AI tool is not an attorney, and that the documents were not prepared by or at the behest of counsel — not on a categorical rule that any AI use forfeits privilege. A candidate proposing exactly this broader rule was refused; see the governed pane.

2. 2invented quotation

   No such quotation appears in the source filing. The real anchored quotations are the sentences shown in the governed pane, each tied to a specific page of the public document through a citation span.

3. 3fabricated citation

   This case citation does not exist. The governed record cites only the single source document underlying this proofcase, with a public docket URL and a pinned PDF digest — no secondary case law is cited at all.

This is an authored illustration of known ungoverned failure patterns (a fabricated citation, an overconfident characterization of a holding, and an invented quotation). It is not the captured output of any named model or product, and it names no vendor.

Governed

Heppner AI privilege ruling: governed claim lifecycle