UK tribunals drew a line at the upload

The United Kingdom now has its own answer to the question of AI and privilege, and in one respect it is sharper than the American one. In UK v Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Upper Tribunal held that uploading confidential documents into an open-source AI tool can waive privilege and breach client confidentiality, and can warrant referral to the SRA and the ICO. The risk attaches at the moment of upload.

That sits on top of an already firm line on AI hallucinations. In Ayinde, the Divisional Court imposed wasted costs and regulator referrals over fabricated AI citations, describing freely available tools as not capable of reliable legal research. In Ndaryiyumvire, wasted costs followed where fake cases came from a legal-software AI function, and the failure was treated as one of firm supervision.

The SRA has issued no AI-specific rules. Its Principles and Code apply in full, the solicitor remains responsible, and its updated compliance tips ask firms to be clear with clients about AI use and to keep client information confidential. On the data side, the UK GDPR carries penalties up to the higher of seventeen and a half million pounds or four percent of global turnover, and it recognises pseudonymisation as a safeguard under Article 4(5).

If the risk attaches at the upload, the way to manage it is to make sure there is nothing privileged in what you upload. Pseudonymise the document locally first, so the identifying material never reaches the external tool. That is exactly what RedactLocal does: it replaces the identifying details on your own machine, sends only placeholders to the model, and restores the real values locally. The document never leaves your computer, and there is nothing privileged in the upload to waive.

Verify every citation independently as well. The hallucination cases turned on unchecked output, not on AI use as such. The two disciplines together, pseudonymise before you send and verify before you rely, are what keep a firm on the right side of the line the tribunals have drawn.