Compared
Five ways to use AI
on a legal matter
Including the rows where we lose, and to whom. A comparison where the author wins everything is an advertisement; this one is meant to survive being read by someone whose job is finding the hole in it.
No AI Do it the old way | ChatGPT / Claude Consumer accounts | Your own setup Your lawyer + an API key | Local model Running on your hardware | Kovel | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Research quality | n/a Your own time | Yes Frontier model | Yes Frontier model | Partly Well behind frontier | Yes Claude Opus 5 |
A privilege argument is available at all United States v. Heppner. A represented defendant's conversations with a consumer AI assistant were not privileged. Confidentiality failed independently of direction, because the provider's terms permitted access — so attorney direction alone would not have cured it on these facts. | n/a Nothing created | No Squarely what failed | Partly If truly directed | Partly If truly directed | Yes Directed and documented |
Attorney direction recorded before anyone asks | n/a — | No No record exists | Partly If you built it | Partly If you built it | Yes Engagement + direction memo |
Privilege log you can hand to opposing counsel | n/a — | No Reconstruct from exports | No Build it yourself | No Build it yourself | Yes Generated per matter |
The AI provider retains your prompts Consumer terms generally permit use of your conversations. That is the element that failed in United States v. Heppner. | n/a — | No Retained and usable | Partly API terms; ZDR on request | Yes Nothing leaves | Partly US inference; ZDR pending |
The provider never sees your text at all The row we lose. Answering a question means the model must read the question. | Yes Nothing to see | No Sees everything | No Sees everything | Yes Never leaves the machine | No Sees the current turn |
Encrypted at rest under a key the vendor cannot use | n/a — | No Provider holds keys | No Provider holds keys | Partly Your disk, your problem | Yes Client-held since 18 Aug 2026 |
A subpoena to the vendor produces readable content | n/a No vendor | No Produces plaintext | No Produces plaintext | Yes No vendor to serve | Yes Produces ciphertext |
Works with the lawyer you already have | Yes Obviously | No They are not in it | Yes If they will | Partly If they will run it | Yes Bring your own attorney |
Tools to demand the other side's AI history The same ruling exposed everyone else's chat history. Almost nobody is asking yet. | No — | No — | No Draft from scratch | No Draft from scratch | Yes Requests, holds, 30(b)(6) |
Setup | Yes None | Yes Two minutes | No Weeks of engineering | No Hardware and expertise | Yes About twenty minutes |
The rows we lose
A model running on your own hardware beats us on one thing that matters: the provider never reads your text, because there is no provider. To answer a question, a model has to read the question — so during the moment we generate a reply, your current turn is in memory on our servers. It is never stored or logged, and a subpoena reaches what a company has rather than what passed through it. But that is not the same as never touching it, and we would rather write that here than have someone find it.
Doing nothing also beats us on that row, and beats everything on setup. What it costs is the work.
This page claimed to win a third row before the feature behind it existed. It exists now: as of 18 August 2026 there is no key in this service that opens a client matter. The server-side master key and the code that used it were deleted rather than disabled, and the process refuses to start if the variable is put back. A matter cannot accept its first message until both its client key and its attorney key are in place.
On the model we chose
We run Claude Opus 5, and not the most capable model available. The tier above it cannot be used under zero-retention terms — that is a published constraint, not a preference — and for privileged research a contractual promise that nothing is retained is worth more than a marginal gain in capability. Inference is pinned to United States infrastructure.
Zero-retention terms are in negotiation and are not yet in force. When they are, this page will say so and the date will be on it.
Nothing here is legal advice, and using Kovel does not create an attorney-client relationship with Kovel. Privilege depends on the facts of a matter and the law of a jurisdiction. No product can guarantee a court's ruling.