Privilege opinion
When a firm uses an AI tool on a client matter, a court can later ask a blunt question: did using it waive privilege? Kingsfield's answer is built into the architecture. Client PII never reaches the cloud, and the judge rules on tokens. But a firm should not have to defend that on its own. Before Kingsfield handles a paying firm's live matter, we are obtaining a written opinion from independent outside counsel on whether the architecture preserves attorney-client privilege and work-product protection. When it is issued, its conclusions will live here.
What the opinion will address
It is a substantive opinion on the architecture itself, written as if defending a firm's choice to deploy it under a privilege challenge in litigation. The questions it answers:
- Tokenization versus disclosure. When content is tokenized before any model sees it, does the model provider receive the substance of a confidential communication, or only non-identifying tokens?
- The third-party recipient. Is sending tokenized text to a model a third-party disclosure that breaks privilege, or is the provider treated as an agent of the firm, the way an e-discovery vendor or an expert is?
- Cross-matter isolation. Do per-matter boundaries satisfy ethical-wall obligations under the applicable state bar rules?
- Vendor visibility. Under a bring-your-own-model setup, where Kingsfield never sees the firm's own model call, how does the vendor's access compare to a typical cloud legal-research tool that does see every query and answer?
- Audit attribution. What the signed, PII-free Audit Capsule shows, and what it deliberately does not.
Why it has to be independent
We will not write our own privilege opinion. The entire value of the artifact is that competent outside counsel, not the vendor, reached the conclusion. A self-authored opinion would be worth nothing to a firm relying on it.
Consistent with our trade-secret posture, we will publish the opinion's conclusions, not the implementation detail behind them. A firm gets the answer it can point to, without us exposing how the engine is built.
How it pairs with the DPA
The two artifacts answer two different questions. The DPA is the contractual layer. The privilege opinion is the substantive answer to the question a court actually asks. A firm should have both: the contract, and the architectural analysis behind it.
Where this sits
The privilege opinion is one of the independent validations we complete before the first paying matter touches real client data, alongside a third-party penetration test scoped to the PII boundary. Neither is a marketing claim. Each is an artifact a firm can hold. This page will be updated with the opinion's conclusions when it is issued.
Want the conclusions when they land?
If you are a firm weighing Kingsfield, or an attorney willing to review the analysis, tell us. We will share the opinion's conclusions with interested firms as soon as it is issued.