On Friday afternoon the other side's summons arrives: twenty-eight pages, and you want to know what the argument rests on before the weekend. You open ChatGPT on your phone, the account you use at home to look up recipes, and paste the text. Ten seconds later you have the gist in five points.
What happened to those twenty-eight pages depends on the account. Your duty of confidentiality does not. In a free or personal account the text can be used by default to improve the model unless you switch that off, there is no data processing agreement, the chat sits in your history and nobody at the firm can manage any of it. A business account changes the training, the contract and the administration. It does not change the fact that the text went to a third party, and whether that is acceptable in this matter remains for you to judge and for your firm to decide. What you can do is take out everything that makes the matter and the client identifiable before you paste. The legal question survives that perfectly well.
What happens to a summons in a free account?
Five things, and none of them is a hack.
The text can be used for training. On personal ChatGPT accounts the setting to improve the model is on by default; you have to switch it off yourself. The text sits in your chat history, on an account the firm cannot see and that you take with you when you change firms. Memory can retain what you pasted (a client name, a matter, a position), and that context can resurface in a later chat. There is no data processing agreement, because consumer terms do not come with one. And a shared link to the chat gives access to anyone who has it.
Our article on ChatGPT and work data covers these settings in full. For a lawyer the conclusion is simpler than for most readers of that piece: a summons in a free account is client information held by a third party with no agreement in place, and that is exactly what the duty of confidentiality is meant to prevent.
What does a business account change, and what does it not?
| Aspect | Free or personal account | The firm's business account | What it means for your professional duty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Training on input | On by default, you switch it off | Excluded by default | The text travels less far, but it has still been sent |
| Data processing agreement | None | Yes | Settles the GDPR side, not your duty |
| Administration | Nobody at the firm | The firm manages members and settings | The firm can set rules and check they are followed |
| History and memory | With you, on your own account | Inside the firm's environment | What is stored there is still client information |
| Who decides whether it is allowed | You, alone | The firm, tool by tool | The decision should be visible when you open the tool |
With the business versions, input is excluded from training by default, as OpenAI explains, and a data processing agreement is in place. That is the GDPR side, and it is required as soon as the text contains personal data. Our comparison of free and business AI accounts sets out the differences by vendor.
The duty of confidentiality is a different layer. It rests with you as a lawyer, it covers everything the client has entrusted to you and it does not pass to a vendor, not even with a signed agreement. The privilege that goes with it protects the client because what they tell you stays with you. Whether that protection holds when a copy of their story sits with an American vendor is a question with no general answer; it depends on the matter, the tool and what exactly was shared. That is why the business account is a precondition, not a free pass, and why the firm decides for each tool what stays out even with a business account.
What do you take out before you paste?
Everything that makes the matter or the client identifiable. In a summons that is more than you think.
The names of parties, their lawyers, witnesses and experts. Addresses, dates of birth, national identification numbers in family and criminal matters. The case number and the firm's own reference. Company registration numbers, bank account numbers and amounts that make the matter unique, such as a purchase price or a claimed loss. And the passages about health, criminal offences or family circumstances, because those are special category data, with or without a name attached. If you are unsure about a detail that looks harmless on its own, such as a job title or a place name, read our article on quasi-identifiers: three harmless details together often point to one person.
Put a placeholder in their place: [claimant], [defendant], [amount], [date]. The structure of the argument stays intact, and the tool still understands your question, because "on what ground does [claimant] argue that the agreement was terminated" is just as easy to answer as the version with names. The prompt redaction guide shows how to do that quickly and consistently. If you have the whole document as a PDF, redacting the document works better than cutting and pasting; see our guide on redacting a PDF before it goes into an AI tool.
An employment lawyer receives a summons in a dismissal case in which the employee's medical history is set out over two pages. She takes out the names, the personnel number and the medical passage, replaces them with [employee], [employer] and [medical note], and asks the tool in the firm's business account which grounds for dismissal are put forward and how they are supported. The answer is as useful as it would have been with the full text. What the summons said about the employee's health never left the firm.
What does the firm decide, and what stays with you?
Whether ChatGPT is allowed, and with which account, is your firm's decision. A firm that has recorded nothing about it has not banned the tool; it has simply not decided yet, and the cautious approach until then is to put only public information in. You should see that decision when you open the tool, not in a policy document you read once. Our article on which AI tools employees may use shows what such a list looks like.
BeeSensible shows at firm level which AI tools are being opened, with no user ID and no page content, and the firm records a decision for each tool from the Inbox. When you open a tool the firm has decided on, you see that decision in the browser, with the approved alternative as the first button; usually you can carry on, unless the firm has configured it so that staff cannot continue to a tool that is not allowed. When you paste client information into a supported AI tool, party names, matter numbers, amounts and company registration numbers are highlighted as you type, and you choose whether to mask them, remove them or leave them, unless the firm has set masking on paste or on send to Always on. This is what the firm's overview looks like:
