Extract from Chad Ergun’s article, “Nothing to Preserve, Nothing to Waive: The Case for Zero Data Retention in Law Firm AI.”
Zero data retention, where prompts and outputs are processed but never stored by providers, should be a constitutional requirement for any AI system handling client work to protect both competitive intelligence and attorney-client privilege.
Every AmLaw 100 firm can now buy access to the same frontier models. So can their clients and their competitors. Whatever advantage a firm once gained simply by adopting AI early has a shelf life measured in months, because the model itself is becoming what electricity and cloud storage became before it: common infrastructure, priced accordingly.
That should change how firm leaders think about where their advantage lives. It is not in the model. It is in what the firm brings to it: proprietary expertise, trusted client data, encoded workflows, and the feedback loops that make each of those compound over time. Call it the firm’s alpha. My argument is that most firms are quietly leaking it, one prompt at a time, to vendors whose default configurations retain everything, and that the fix belongs in the firm’s AI constitution, the standing document that governs what the firm will and will not do with client information in AI systems, rather than in any individual contract. Zero data retention, where prompts and outputs exist on the provider’s infrastructure only during processing and are stored for nothing afterward, should be a constitutional requirement for any AI system that touches client work.
