AI and Legal Ethics: Protecting Client Privacy in a Changing Legal System, with Sunny Eaton

Episode Notes

Transcript

Bernadette Harris:

Hi, I’m Bernadette.

Zack Glaser:

And I’m Zack and this is episode 618 of The Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today I talk with Sunny Eaton about wrongful convictions and why AI should not erase privacy expectations and weirdly how those two might actually be connected or why she would be the person to be able to talk about that.

Bernadette Harris:

Well, that sounds interesting. I honestly cannot wait to hear this episode.

Zack Glaser:

It is a neat one. And this episode actually came out of a conversation that Sunny, myself and a couple of other people had at the Women in AI conference back a couple of months ago. So I was like, “Sunny, I want to get you on the show to talk about this. ” Just a little bit of heads up. The concepts and the ideas that we’re talking about this in this conversation is really more about getting people to think about it. Honestly, my ideas are not fully baked. And so I expect people to push back against some of the things that we say in here and things like that, or to extend on what we say. But this is a conversation about AI and our privacy expectations that I think we need to really, really start having. And so I appreciate Sunny being here and talking about that.

Bernadette Harris:

Awesome. Can’t wait to listen. So before we got started, we were actually talking about our Slack channel.

Zack Glaser:

Yes, the lawyers lab Slack channel.

Bernadette Harris:

Yeah. And a really great post that was posted that we saw today. You want to talk about it?

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. So Leticia posted something. One of our coaches posted something that is really interesting to me because of the amount, honestly, of gardening that my wife does because we’re talking about pruning things. She starts with, “Loyalty can keep a relationship alive long after it started working or long after it stopped working.” Not long after it started, long after it stopped working. And it’s this idea that something can feel like it’s working or feel like it’s supposed to be there and it’s not broken, but it doesn’t need to be there. And that really kind of resonates with me as it relates to, and this seems like a simple example, but pruning trees, pruning back things. Even when your planting starts the seeds into an area and you get a ton of basil, you get a ton of basil coming up and it’s like, well, which ones do I take out?

I don’t really care, but you need to take some of them out of there in order to make one grill. Right now. Yeah. Yeah. And I thought that was really, really interesting. The idea of maybe getting rid of some of our relationships or some of our clients or some of the vendors that we even have that again, it’s not broken. Or

Bernadette Harris:

Employees.

Zack Glaser:

Oh, employees. Yes. I mean, that’s a big one where we talk a lot about right but right seat and the EOS model talks about right butt right seat. And sometimes we look at our employees and we have so much loyalty and they’ve been with us for so long, but the way that we’re operating has changed and we

Bernadette Harris:

Think- And they

Zack Glaser:

Haven’t. And they haven’t. And we think, well, maybe we can adjust just that seat for them. And is that the right thing to do? I would say no.

Bernadette Harris:

Yeah, I’m thinking no. I’m thinking no. Yeah.

Zack Glaser:

But that’s a tough thing to do. It really is. And I think we need to acknowledge that, that pruning that thing that you have loyalty to, thing that has loyalty to you is really difficult. But I think the point that Leticia was making here is that if you do it, it’s healthier for everybody and everything.

Bernadette Harris:

And I think it’s also like going back to the whole analogy of gardening. I don’t have a green thumb, but I’ve played around a little bit. And I remember when I had my house in Atlanta, I had this tree that I actually cut it back and I was outside with a chainsaw and I blew my own mind. I

Sunny Eaton:

Love

Bernadette Harris:

That. Yeah. But I cut this tree back and it was at the right time. I can’t remember the season, but it was the season to cut the tree back. And at the time it looked like, why are you doing that? But months later, oh my gosh, that same tree was blooming. And so it is so necessary to cut back at some points when just … Yeah, but it’s tough. It is definitely tough.

Zack Glaser:

And I think that’s the thing here is kind of just making sure that we’re recognizing that this is something that has to be done. It really is. It is something that is tough. But the line that Leticia put in here that I thought really got me was that loyalty will give you a hundred reasons to keep feeding it.

Bernadette Harris:

That’s the gut punch. That is the gut punch.

Zack Glaser:

It really is because again, we know in our professor brain, we know in our reasoning portion of our brain that we need to do this thing for the sake of our company, for the sake of the thing that we’re building, what we’re growing. And oh my God, is it hard? Well, let’s leave

Bernadette Harris:

People with that. I think we can leave it there. Yeah. Well, you can leave it right there.

Zack Glaser:

Maybe what’s the thing that you need that you’ve been putting off pruning in your life, in your office, in your practice, in your relationships? What’s the thing that you’ve been putting off pruning? And I don’t need an answer from people, but just think about that.

Bernadette Harris:

Yeah. Because I’m over here thinking about my … I’m processing my own stuff.

Zack Glaser:

Oh man. Oh, man. I mean, I got people that I want to get rid of, but what’s the one that’s a little bit more difficult? Well, speaking of people that I don’t want to get rid of, because Sunny is a great friend and a wonderful friend of the program as well, she has a couple of other episodes where we’ve talked about her work in wrongful convictions at the Davidson County Tennessee DA’s office, but now we’ll listen to my conversation with her about a little bit different stuff.

Sunny Eaton:

Hi, I’m Sunny. I’m Sunny Eaton. I live in Nashville, Tennessee. I am an attorney with the Nashville District Attorney’s Office. I’m the director of the Conviction Review Unit, which means I work in wrongful convictions. The majority of my career was spent in criminal defense work and I also did some small business consulting, particularly around the area of trademarks and IP. I have a particular interest in mental health and mental health law and how lawyers live their lives in a way that is kind to our nervous system so that we can be better stewards of the law.

Zack Glaser:

Sunny, thank you for being with me. It has been a couple of years I think since we had you on the show, but I always like talking with you and I always like having you on the show. I appreciate it.

Sunny Eaton:

Thanks for having me again, Zach.

Zack Glaser:

So honestly, I don’t remember exactly what we talked about last time. I think it was when you were kind of new in the crew in the conviction review unit. And so I imagine we talked a little bit about that, but I want to dig into some of what that is for people that don’t necessarily know. So I’m in Memphis as far as I know, we don’t have a conviction review

Sunny Eaton:

Unit. You do. You do, actually. Look at that. It’s a newer unit. They call it their Justice Review Unit, which is probably why you didn’t, because I think they’re one of the few that doesn’t have the word conviction in their name, but they do have a unit. They’ve done some really good things lately.

Zack Glaser:

Okay. Okay. Well, so what is it for people that don’t necessarily know, for people that may live in a city that they have no idea that they have the Justice Review Unit?

Sunny Eaton:

And that is most people. There are only about 85 of us in the country right now, though we are really pushing for this to exist in every district attorney’s office. But essentially we are a unit. I used to be a criminal defense lawyer and that is standard for a lot of these units as someone who has had criminal defense experience leads them. But my entire job is to look back at old convictions out of our office in my county and assess them to make sure that we got them right. Sometimes that means a full reinvestigation. So far my unit has led to … And we work with partners, by the way. We often work with Tennessee Innocence Project or private attorneys locally, but in this collective effort in Nashville, we’ve been able to exonerate six people and we have three more cases pending. So we’re really proud of this work.

It is not easy. There’s a lot of distrust on both sides of the line when you work for the DA’s office, but you’re working to undo wrongs. It’s a new legal area.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Kind of going with that, how does that sit with your colleagues with going back over things? Are you going back over cases that are umpteen years old or are we talking about something that just happened?

Sunny Eaton:

Well, we’ll look at anything that comes to us. What is required for us to do an investigation is that there is some new evidence that was not heard by a jury and it has to be actually new evidence that wasn’t heard by a jury because we’re not trying to act as another jury, right? We’re not trying to overtake the role of the court, but we also have to recognize that this is a human system. And in a human system run by humans, mistakes are going to be made. And we really reinforce trust in the system when we’re willing to admit those mistakes and try to fix them. So that’s what’s springing up in DA’s offices and we’re uniquely situated to be able to do this work. We’ve got institutional memory, we’ve got access to things that the outside public and outside agencies don’t have. But as far as how it sits with my colleagues, I am very lucky in Nashville.

I work with an office with a lot of brilliant young lawyers who really want to do the right thing and make sure that the right thing happens. When I first started the job, there was distrust. Of course there was, right? Who is this person who is the only non-prosecuting attorney in our office? What is she doing here?

But over time, we’ve built trust. We really have. And at this point I position myself on purpose. I’m not there to villainize people. I’m not there to end careers. That’s not what I’m trying to do.

Zack Glaser:

I

Sunny Eaton:

Am just trying to make sure that we get things right and make sure that the community can trust us. That’s my job. And so most of the people in my office get that. And now young lawyers will come to me for questions. I forgot to turn this over in discovery. What do I do? And that is really important to have and to have that kind of trust because we also want to prevent these things. We want to make sure that justice actually has a chance here.

Zack Glaser:

How amazing is that? That concept right there of like, hey, either I forgot to turn this over in discovery, maybe I didn’t make a mistake, but I’m concerned about something that happened and I have a place in my office that I trust that I can go to and say, how do we handle this? How do we make sure that we’re doing the correct thing? That’s amazing to me actually.

Sunny Eaton:

I really enjoy that part of it because again, I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble. I’m just trying to make the right thing happen. So when that kind of thing happens, young lawyers will come to me and they want to know about the ethics of it. I just want to call up the defense lawyer and say, “Hey, this is what happened. How do we get this to you as quickly as possible?” So it’s a nice role because I’m really just there to help. That’s my entire job is I’m trying to help whoever needs help.

Zack Glaser:

Well, and we still need clarity though. We need finality to these things. So what are some of the things that I guess you wouldn’t be able to take up? You’re not going through and just looking at cases, looking over old case files and saying, “I don’t like this attorney.

Sunny Eaton:

I’m going

Zack Glaser:

To question everything they did.”

Sunny Eaton:

No, I’m not doing that. I don’t have the time. I don’t have the staff. I don’t have the budget. And like I said, trust is so important. It really is. So we have a very narrow set of standards for our investigations. But when we know that, say there’s a bad actor that we didn’t know about before, if we found out that we had a police detective who was fabricating evidence as a pattern that we can identify, yeah we’ve got a duty to look back at those cases. If there is new DNA, we’ve got a duty to look back at that case if we know that science has significantly changed. And that’s one of the things we’re going to talk about today is just shifting standards and shifting ideas about technology and things, how they exist in our system. But I don’t have the power to go look at things because say someone has changed who they are.

I get a lot of those letters. I’ve been in prison for 20 years, I’ve done a million programs, I’m a better person. I was very young then. I appreciate that. I want those people to have a remedy somewhere, but that’s not what I do. That’s not what I do. What I do is purely look for actual innocence because the biggest tragedy in our system is for someone who is innocent of a crime to be sitting behind bars for something they didn’t do. That doesn’t help victims, that doesn’t help faith in the system. So I’m very narrow in what I can take on. But as you can imagine, even with the most conservative statistic that 1% of the cases of convictions are wrongful, those are huge numbers. I’m never going to run out of things to do.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, that’s true. And again, you still have to have something that is like new evidence or a new way to look at evidence. So let’s actually talk about that for a second. Do some of these things or are you seeing as we increase technology, as we increase our ability to do things, are you seeing places where you can kind of find some more clarity or some more justice ability there?

Sunny Eaton:

Sure. I mean, science does what we want it to do. It evolves constantly. And

You know this as well as anyone’s act. No one is shorter to evolve with science than the courts. The courts and lawyers, we’re a curmudgeony bunch. I mean, we are very slow to adopt change. We’re very slow. Science isn’t actually as slow as we are and that tends to be my biggest roadblock is I understand what we all understand about how science evolves and how what we believed six months ago might not be what we believe today. But courts, however, we can have science that has evolved over a 20-year period of time and courts are still very reluctant to suggest that maybe we got something wrong based on that. I think that we are quick to convict based on forensic science, but we are not quick to look again based on that. But there is change. DNA science is far more advanced than it was say 30 years ago.

We can get DNA off smaller sizes of samples. There’s more types that we can get. Those things are worth taking a look at again. And even this is my personal soapbox, that’s why I’m stumbling over it because it’s really important to me, but it is something that the courts are just so skeptical about is where science has changed in more social ways. What we understand about bias and how it works has really evolved. What we understand about trauma has changed exponentially since nine eleven. I mean, because after nine eleven, a billion dollars of research went into trauma. And so now we understand its mechanism so much more. Well, think about how that plays out and how we understood how someone interacted with the police 30 years ago versus what we understand about those interactions now. It can change how we view what we might’ve said was a confession 30 years ago, but now it’s very clear to even a layperson, “Oh, this is a trauma response that was happening.

That was actually not something that we can construe as a confession.”

Zack Glaser:

I had not even thought about those things. And just admittedly, my father was a defense attorney. He was a public defender for a while. So admittedly, I’m in the area of like, “All right, well let’s question. Let’s make sure that people are guilty.” I hadn’t even thought about the idea of trauma kind of presenting itself diferently now. Well, I guess it’s not even trauma presenting itself differently. It’s our understanding, like you

Sunny Eaton:

Said. It’s our understanding

Zack Glaser:

At it. Of what the presentation is.

Sunny Eaton:

Right. I mean, 30 years ago we were still only talking about trauma in terms of things like wartime veterans. We weren’t talking about a mother who was looking at a child in distress and how they’re responding in that moment and there wasn’t enough research then. So part of my job now is finding the new research, assessing its credibility and then figuring out a way to explain to the courts how the evolution is impacting how we look at a case.

Zack Glaser:

Does that lead you to, I know this is called conviction review unit and I accidentally say convictions review unit at times. Does that lead you to look at things in buckets, in groups to say like, okay- No. Okay.

Sunny Eaton:

No, it can’t. I mean, if there’s anything … I’m a criminal lawyer. I’m not a business lawyer. I’ve dabbled in family law in the past. But one thing I think as lawyers that we figure out after law school that law school does not prepare us for is the individuality of every case. Every single case has to stand alone. It just does. The factors are different, the individuals are different. So no, I can’t. Now I might identify cases that need to be reviewed in buckets. So in their broad identification, like for example, we know a police detective used illegal methods to get confessions, something like that. Well, then yeah, I’m probably going to pull every case I can find with that police officer where there was a confession involved. But as far as applying these ideas and assessing the science and assessing the evidence, we have to do that case by case.

Zack Glaser:

And I think that would make people listening to this feel better about that. Yes, we can go and say, “Okay, well, this has changed, but we still need to go into each of these individual ones.”

Sunny Eaton:

Well, let me give you a really solid example of that is shaken baby syndrome. That’s incredibly controversial. There’s been a lot of national media cases about this. And I do think that our understanding of abusive head trauma has really changed over the last few years. We really understand it. Does that mean that every case where someone was found to have committed abusive head trauma, does that mean that it doesn’t exist? Absolutely not. I can believe that shaken baby syndrome as a diagnosis is outdated medicine. That doesn’t mean that a shaking of a baby didn’t happen. So I have to look at everything outside of just the changing science, because often the science is only one part of the evidence that convicted someone and they’re often supporting things. So in an arson case I had not long ago, we know that arson science has changed. He was convicted on bad science, no question.

But I needed to look at the entire case to make sure there wasn’t other evidence that would’ve convicted him even if you’d removed that science.

Zack Glaser:

That makes sense because we’re not talking about trying to find flaws in a case. We’re trying to find innocence.

Sunny Eaton:

Right. There are always flaws in a case, but that’s not what I do.

Zack Glaser:

Right, right. And that makes a lot of sense. Okay. Last time you and I talked, it was at the Women in AI conference and we had been talking about how technology changes, but also our society changes, our expectations of things change based on that technology. And specifically, I wanted to talk to you about maybe our expectations of privacy as they’re moving. This is something that’s in the headlines at different times right now, but we had discussed this idea. Obviously you have to get a search warrant in order to find information in somebody’s phone. Makes sense.

Sunny Eaton:

Totally

Zack Glaser:

Makes sense. Absolutely. But right now I don’t have to get a search warrant to buy that information that goes to a third party and I think that’s odd. Is that wrong? But I think that’s odd. And I think that you’re a good person to kind of talk to about this because you did spend a lot of time as a defense attorney and you’re also in the prosecutor’s office as well. So I thought you might have some interesting thoughts on- Well,

Sunny Eaton:

And I’ll tell you another place that this comes up a lot, which is an area that I’m really interested in is in mental health. I talk to a lot of therapists who are very concerned about these issues. I serve on the board of a couple of mental health related organizations and therapists are very concerned about the privacy issues involved here. And I think therapists and lawyers, given that we both have the highest level of confidentiality and our privilege, we are having the same conversations. And let me say right up front, I’m not a constitutional law attorney. Neither am I. I am not a contracts attorney. I’m not a corporate attorney. I’m none of those things. I am just average Joe lawyer who thinks about these issues because I’m also very online. I’m very online. I’m very interested in legal tech. That’s how we got connected originally.

And I also am someone who works inside of a system where things evolve and things evolve and we have to be permeable to that evolution as we do our job. So AI in particular is where we’re going with this conversation. There is a recent court case that I am all … I wish I remembered the name of it, I don’t, but I’m already seeing lawyers take a knee on the argument and broaden what the court case actually said as it related to AI and attorney-client privilege.

This is where I’m really concerned. I’m really concerned that we have just decided that if you’re using AI on your phone, you don’t have a privacy right.

Zack Glaser:

We’re kind of taking a knee and saying like, okay, well, all of this stuff is … If it’s out in AI, we’ve given up the privacy idea.

Sunny Eaton:

Right. And we have. I keep hearing lawyers saying, “Oh, well, the court decided on this. ” And I think that was a very, I don’t even know, that was a very particular set of circumstances about how a lawyer and their client were utilizing AI to produce documents is my understanding of that case. That to me is very different than average user these questions. But yeah, we seem to have accepted this idea that, well, if you’re using ChatGPT, if you’re using Claude, anything you put in those apps is a free-for-all of our information. Now, although Zach, one thing when you were talking about this earlier, we have to really make a distinction between what the government can do and what private parties can do, right?

Zack Glaser:

Right, right. But I think that’s where I see us, like you said, kind of taking the knee and just being like, “Well, there it is. ” What I think we forget is that we get to make these laws and expectations and I say we, not just lawyers, but society gets to determine whether or not something is quote unquote private or whether or not something-

Sunny Eaton:

Right. But the standard, I mean, the standard that hasn’t changed is a reasonable expectation of privacy. When we’re talking about government intrusion on our privacy, I mean, it’s a whole different conversation with private parties, but when we’re talking about government intrusion on our privacy, reasonable expectation of privacy is the standard. That’s what it is. So I think, yeah, we can get into the weeds talking about the contracts of these apps and things like that, but is that the real question that we should be arguing with the courts?

Zack Glaser:

Well, so one of the things that I really wanted to talk about this, one of the things that spurred me to make sure that we were talking about this, and again, I thought you were a uniquely situated to at least talk about it from, like you said, average Joe attorney standpoint, but you still have unique experiences behind you is I was talking to an attorney at TechShow and they had gone through this privacy issue. It was a privacy attorney and we were discussing use of AI products in one’s law firm and the example that they had said was you use an intake service and it is using an unvetted AI product to kind of go through the information that your potential client is putting into this intake service. That unvetted AI sells the user data and you don’t know it.

You don’t think of it, you just signed this contract with them You don’t think they’re going to sell this information of your client and frankly, the salespeople tell you they’re not going to sell the information of the client. But then through these data brokers that I don’t think a lot of people really understand the concept of, through these data brokers, this information gets into LexisNexis and into Accurint. And I did collections when I practiced and I had a subscription to Accurint in order to skip trace people in order to find people and it is effing insane the amount of information that is in Accurint. And federal organizations in this scenario, ICE has access to Accurint ICE then uses that information that was sold to them through this AI company to prosecute or find your potential client. That’s insane.

Sunny Eaton:

I agree. I agree. I also think that’s insane. Yeah. I don’t think that the availability of a tool means that the government gets to use it. The rules are simply different for the government. Now, do I think that a court would probably uphold that today? Yeah, because I don’t think we’ve made the right arguments yet. I don’t think that we have, as lawyers, we’ve evolved enough to make the arguments that the court needs for that evolution, but do I inherently think that that’s okay? No, I don’t. And here, let me give you an example. So expungements. When you have a case expunged, when I was a defense lawyer, this is how I often advised people. We still need to keep a copy of your judgment showing that that case was dismissed because even though it is expunged from court records and governments can no longer give out that information or provide it, can’t control a private data collection corporation from accessing that data and not having updated it or having the most updated.

So let’s say you’re applying for a job three years down the road and someone uses a private background check company. They might have the old iteration of your record and that may still contain the expunged item. There’s nothing I can do and I don’t think there’s any law, again, not my area, but I don’t think there’s any law that prevents them from doing that and reporting that information, but the government doesn’t get to use it against you. It is expunged. So just the existence of an ability to get a certain type of information doesn’t mean that I think that the government has a free for all to use it. I think the government is far more limited. It’s held to higher standards. When we talk about our constitutional protections, that is about preventing the government from intruding on our privacy. It’s not about just anyone.

So it’s a very different conversation.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. I like how you’re kind of separating that, but it feels like one of those things, I think we take the knee because it feels like a fight that’s too hard to fight. It feels like too uphill of a battle.

Sunny Eaton:

Yeah. I think we thought that about email too a long time ago. I mean, I think that when we all first started using email, the same conversation was here. Well, you are literally providing your data to Google. We all thought that, well, you’re giving your information to Microsoft, you’re giving your information to Google. Well, we don’t think about it that way anymore. I mean, sure, is it a reduced expectation of privacy? Yes, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I mean, the government still has thresholds they have to get at to get that information from your Email. So I think that we are really prematurely taking a knee here. And email to me is a great example because when I send an email, I am inherently sharing something with another party no matter what. So my expectation of privacy is low. Do I believe when I am average person having a conversation essentially with myself with ChatGPT that I have no expectations of privacy on my own phone with myself or that it would be less than I would have with an email that is going to someone else.

That doesn’t make sense to me. That logic is not congruent to me.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah.

Sunny Eaton:

I mean, there was an argument that was made at one point in time that if you use Microsoft, especially 365, if you use these things, well, Microsoft has access to everything that you do. It lives in the cloud, their technicians have access. Does that once again mean that every single thing on my computer and any Microsoft app the government can just have and get to without any search warrant? Is that what that means?

Zack Glaser:

Right.

Sunny Eaton:

I don’t think that’s what that means.

Zack Glaser:

Well, but then we’ve also got, and this is where I play with this in the AI products, is just the attorney-client privilege. Is this information like, have I actually given this to a third party? And where I wind up in my advice a lot of times, and I hate this advice, I really do, is do you want to be the person arguing to keep your attorney-client privilege? Do you really want to be standing up in front of the judge to argue that? And I think one of the things that kind of inherent in our conversation is we need people to argue that.

Sunny Eaton:

We do. And look, I also think that our duties related to this and our expectations differ. I mean, if we’re talking about information the attorneys are putting into AI, I think that is a much different question. I tell therapists the same thing when I’m talking to them. It is very different conversation I’m having with your clients than I’m having with you. I think we as attorneys have a much higher duty to protect what we can on our end of privilege. I think that BAA agreements exist. These things, there are ways that we can actually work with these companies to ensure privacy for our clients, but that’s not the real question. When I talk with therapists, what I think kind of blows their minds is when we talk about what can ruin your privilege, it’s usually not what the therapists do, it’s what the clients do.

And that’s the same thing here. I tell my clients, what I did in the past, if I email you and you forward that email to a friend of yours, you have destroyed our privilege between us and I had nothing to do with that. So again, that’s a nuance. There’s a different … I think as a lawyer, I don’t have any business putting identifying client information into AI as an attorney where educated parties, the duty lies with us, that’s different. But if I am my neighbor, Scott, who’s talking to AI about his girl problems at 1:00 AM in the morning on his phone, how can we say that Scott has no expectation of privacy there? Because what? Because some digital identifier and zeros and ones is going to the parent company. Look, I don’t know how we can make that argument with a straight face just because you signed a contract saying, well, A, the contracts do need to change.

I mean, we do need to ask these companies to start changing those as well. They’ve got to evolve too. But that’s not the question. The question is government intrusion. And yeah, no, lawyers, we should be arguing that there is a privacy right here. We should be arguing that there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. And look, I also want to say though that my view on this is narrow too. I’m not talking about if we use ChatGPT from our desk at work on a company computer. I’m not talking about an enterprise version where we have a team account. I’m talking about individual on their individual device having a conversation with their AI.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Well, and I think the bigger thing as we kind of wrap up here is just the idea of that reasonable expectation of privacy. It changing what we interact with. In my view, we can’t use the rules of even five years ago to be doing this. We have to adjust with what regular people on the street think is going to be private because I mean, I think that this goes beyond even data on our phone. This goes into being able to use certain tools, being able to use certain AI tools to deanonymize people and things like that. And I think the biggest thing with this conversation, you and I said at the beginning, we’re not solving this. I just really wanted to talk to you about this and get some of the ideas out there.

Sunny Eaton:

Yeah. But no, we’re not solving it. And I know, look, a lot of lawyers are going to come for me in this for these opinions, but I think that let’s email again, email and text messages. It’s so woven into our fabric of how we just conduct our lives day-to-day now, that it’s a non-concern. Well, that is where AI is going quickly. It is quickly getting very woven into the fabric of every single piece of the way we conduct our lives. So to say that we have no reasonable expectations of privacy and not argue that point seems to me that we are starting to make the argument that we never have a reasonable expectation of privacy and that is a slippery slope I am not willing to ride down.

Zack Glaser:

I’m going to hang on that one. Let’s stop on that because I personally, I agree with you and I think that’s exactly right. I don’t think anybody would say that they want to get to a place where we have no expectation of privacy.

Sunny Eaton:

And I know you’re wrapping up, but I want to say that as lawyers, it is our job to make the government work for it. I say that as a government attorney. As

Zack Glaser:

Government. Yeah.

Sunny Eaton:

Our job is not to just say sure and let our clients go to the wolves. Our job is to make them work for it. It’s to put up the fight.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, I like that. Well, once again, Sunny, thank you for getting on here and bearing with me. I don’t know if people on the podcast can tell that I had some technical difficulties here. I hope they couldn’t, but thank you for bearing with my technical difficulties. As a legal tech advisor, it always feels really good when I have major technical issues.

Sunny Eaton:

I’ll talk to you anytime, Zach, even over terrible internet.

Zack Glaser:

I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Well, thank you again, Sunny.

Sunny Eaton:

All right. Have a good one. See you soon.

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