Rule 1.6 when the tool is a third party
Lesson 1 of 6 · Confidentiality and the client's facts
1 · Learn the move · Constraints + negative instructions
Rule 1.6 does not ask whether the tool is good. It asks whether you revealed information relating to the representation, and to whom [M]. A consumer chat window is a third party: the vendor can see what you typed, may keep it, and under some plans may use it to train [S]. The bar opinions that have addressed generative AI say roughly the same thing in different words: the duty of competence covers understanding the tool, the duty of confidentiality covers what you put in it, and for a self-learning tool a general engagement-letter consent is not enough [P]. Privilege is a separate question with the same shape: a communication shared with a third party outside the privilege can lose it, and whether a vendor under contract is inside or outside is argued, not settled [S]. So the constraints go into the prompt, not into your memory of them. The model is told what never comes back (a name, a matter fact that identifies, a privileged communication) and what it does when the paste carries one (stops, says so, returns nothing else). Negative instructions are the whole lesson: the list of what the output must not contain is longer than the list of what it must.
Before I paste anything about a client, answer three questions from the plan terms I paste below: (1) who at the vendor can see what I send, (2) whether it is used to train a model, and (3) how long it is kept. Quote the line that answers each or write [NOT IN THE TERMS]. Do not tell me whether this plan is safe for client information, whether a paste would be a Rule 1.6 disclosure, or whether privilege survives; those are my questions and my bar's. Terms: [paste]
2 · Your turn. You write the prompt
A partner at Marchetti & Ostrow learns that the firm's paralegals have been summarizing deposition transcripts in a free chat tool since the spring. Names in, holdings out. She wants a one-page explanation of what Rule 1.6 says happened, with no reassurance in it, before the firm's policy meeting.
Write the prompt for this scenario as given, or swap in a real one from your own work. The score works the same either way.
Remember: the AI sees only your prompt, not this page. If the situation isn't in your prompt, it doesn't exist.
Optional. These shape the output when you run your prompt below, not your score.