If you believe your employer has been defrauding the federal government, your first instinct may be to organize your thoughts before contacting an attorney. Increasingly, potential clients are turning to AI tools like ChatGPT to help draft case summaries or intake narratives before reaching out to a law firm. While the impulse to arrive prepared is understandable, using AI to build your case summary carries serious legal risks that could compromise your case before it even begins.
AI Cannot Keep Your Information Confidential
When you enter details about your employer’s alleged misconduct into a commercial AI platform, you are sharing that information with a third-party service. Most major AI tools retain user inputs to train and improve their models. This means that sensitive details about your employer, your colleagues, and the alleged fraud could be stored on servers outside of your control and potentially used in ways you never intended.
This is especially dangerous if you upload or paste actual employer documents, such as contracts, invoices, internal communications, or billing records, into an AI tool for analysis. Doing so could constitute an unauthorized disclosure of confidential business information, exposing you to claims of breach of confidentiality agreements or other employment-related liability. It also strips those documents of any protection they might otherwise carry.
You May Inadvertently Waive Attorney-Client Privilege
Attorney-client privilege is one of the most important protections available to a whistleblower. It shields communications between you and your attorney from disclosure to opposing parties. However, privilege does not attach until you are actually communicating with an attorney, and it can be waived if confidential information is shared with a third party before that relationship is established.
Submitting a detailed case narrative generated with the help of an AI tool, or including information that you first disclosed to that tool, can create complications around privilege. If the opposing party later argues that key facts were disclosed to a third-party AI platform before privilege attached, it could affect the scope of what is protected in your case.
AI Analysis of Legal and Regulatory Issues Is Unreliable
False Claims Act cases are highly technical. They involve specific legal standards around what qualifies as a “false claim,” the knowledge requirements for liability, the whistleblower’s role as a relator, and the procedural requirements for filing a qui tam complaint under seal. AI tools are not equipped to accurately assess whether the facts you describe meet these standards.
A chatbot may tell you that your situation does or does not constitute fraud, and it may be wrong in either direction. Potential clients who arrive with an AI-generated case summary have sometimes already formed inaccurate conclusions about the strength of their claims, which can complicate the intake process and the attorney-client relationship from the start.
What You Should Do Instead
The best move is to contact a whistleblower attorney directly before you share details of the fraud with anyone else and avoid using AI tools to assess your claims altogether. The attorney-client relationship establishes privilege from the moment of your initial consultation. A whistleblower lawyer will know exactly what information is relevant, how to handle sensitive documents appropriately, and how to evaluate your claim accurately under the False Claims Act or other whistleblower statutes.
Speak to a Whistleblower Attorney at Keller Grover
If you have witnessed fraud against the federal or state governments, protect yourself and your claims by speaking with an experienced whistleblower attorney first. At Keller Grover, we can walk you through the process confidentially and help you understand your rights as a whistleblower. Contact our legal team today.