Ruling Opens AI Chat Logs to Litigation Discovery

Earlier this year a New York federal judge opened a new legal frontier, ruling that chat logs are subject to discovery in litigation. In an article for the ABA’s Litigation publication, LPHS partner Chris Schwegmann examines the implications of the decision, noting that “going forward, any preservation letter in a complex litigation should include AI materials as a stand-alone, explicitly named category.”

In the brief history of Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, and other AI tools, users have come to view the platforms as private and conversational. But Chris writes that these records can offer a detailed and candid view into an individual’s unguarded mind “before the lawyers arrived, before the narrative was set, before the performance began.” That dynamic may make a chat log the most important and revealing evidentiary breakthrough for the foreseeable future.

Read the complete article “The Unguarded Mind” here.