Everyone is turning to AI to get organized, prepare for attorney meetings, and make sense of divorce. Seattle family law attorney Amanda DuBois, founder of DuBois Law Group and 30 years into practicing, explains why that instinct can backfire.
Amanda walks through why conversations with a chatbot have no attorney-client privilege, which means your prompts and the AI's answers can be requested in discovery or subpoenaed. She connects it to something she has seen for decades: journals and diaries are discoverable too, unless you are keeping them at your lawyer's direction for the case.
Amanda shares examples that show how a casual comment to a chatbot can carry major legal weight, including how a remark about when your marriage ended could affect a date-of-separation argument worth a million dollars in stock.
You'll also hear where AI genuinely helps, like sorting credit card statements or calendars, and why it is usually better to hand that work to your attorney, where it stays privileged.
Karen and Amanda talk about the hidden cost of AI-generated questions and AI-edited legal briefs, including hallucinated case citations that your attorney's team then has to untangle at your expense.
The episode closes with practical steps: ask your attorney what they are comfortable with you using AI for, and ask any attorney you are considering how they use AI in their own practice. Amanda also shares more about her firm's Seattle, Edmonds, and Port Townsend offices.
Karen will revisit this topic every few months as the rules evolve. This conversation was recorded in July 2026.
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