United States v. Heppner: documents a defendant made with an AI tool, not at a lawyer’s direction, were not privileged.

In United States v. Heppner, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled, in a written opinion of 17 February 2026, that documents a defendant created with a commercial generative AI tool, without any suggestion from counsel, and later sent to counsel were not protected by attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine, on the facts presented.

Norton Rose Fulbright’s 2025 Annual Litigation Trends Survey polled more than 400 general counsel and in-house litigation leaders in the United States and Canada in September 2024.

Of respondents who expect more IP exposure in the year ahead, 47% chose use of third-party software or components, such as free AI tools, as a factor. The survey notes this factor is not exclusive to AI. Among respondents whose IP exposure grew in the past year, 44% reported greater vulnerability to trade secret disputes.

The 2026 edition, published in January 2026, surveyed more than 400 US general counsel and in-house litigation leaders in September 2025. It found that IP dispute risk “has yet to meaningfully accelerate”: 22% reported more IP litigation exposure in 2025, down from 27% in 2024, and 21% expect more in the next 12 months.

In March 2023, less than 20 days after its semiconductor division began allowing staff to use ChatGPT, Samsung found three cases of company information entered into it: source code in two cases and the text of a recorded meeting in the third. In May 2023 it temporarily restricted the use of generative AI tools on company-owned computers, tablets and phones, and on other devices running on its internal networks.

In a ShareGate survey about Copilot, governance and AI readiness, answered in March 2026 by 851 IT leaders in the US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland, 29% said AI tools had surfaced sensitive internal data they should not have had access to. ShareGate sells Microsoft 365 migration and governance software.

What Mandate does

Mandate checks each message to AI websites against your rules before it leaves, and copies Microsoft 365 Copilot’s own log into the same signed record.