ChatGPT Case Prep Becomes Evidence Against the Client

The institutional move in Heppner is narrow but durable: courts do not need new AI doctrine to pull chatbot exchanges into discovery. Existing privilege rules already punish disclosure to outsiders, and public AI platforms give adversaries a clean argument that the client left the protected channel. The immediate compliance lesson is not to ban every tool; it is to stop treating prompt boxes as informal workspaces when they contain litigation facts. The firms that write this into intake scripts and client warnings first will control the next malpractice conversation.