Two related gaps in current legal tools.
Attorneys today organize cases in Teams folders, Dropbox, or case management software — useful utilities, but none built as an AI-assisted productivity tool. Meanwhile, clients increasingly turn to consumer AI to make sense of their matters, in conversations that can fall outside the attorney-client privilege — as the 2026 decision in United States v. Heppner underscored. ClearlyConcise addresses both: a tool attorneys and clients use together, built around the privilege.
Designed around attorney-client privilege.
ClearlyConcise is a tool that attorneys and clients use together, at the attorney's direction. Three principles hold it together:
At the direction of counsel
Clients use ClearlyConcise only at their attorney's invitation and direction. No one signs up on their own.
Privilege by architecture
Client information is encrypted in transit and at rest, sealed inside a per-matter workspace, and processed only under zero-data-retention terms — not entered into a consumer chatbot. The architecture, not contract terms alone, is what protects.
Information, never advice
The AI helps attorneys and clients organize facts and put accounts into clear words. Legal advice stays with the attorney, where it belongs.
In pre-pilot development.
ClearlyConcise is being built now, in consultation with practicing attorneys. A limited, attorney-supervised pilot is anticipated for late 2026.
Why now. How it is built. What it does.
The law. California's statute on attorneys and generative AI takes effect January 1, 2027, and a federal court has held that what a client tells a consumer AI tool may not be privileged. What § 6068.1 requires → · What your client tells an AI →
How it is built. Nine questions any attorney should put to any AI vendor in writing (the column, as it ran in the Daily Journal), and our answers to each: what is true today, who verified it, what is still owed. The nine, answered → · What has been checked, by whom, and what has not →
What it does. A five-minute look at the client's side and the attorney's side on a synthetic matter, from the first call to the first pleading. Coming the week of the column; until then, write for a demonstration.
SB 574 is signed. Section 6068.1 takes effect January 1, 2027.
California now has a statute on attorneys and generative AI: no delegating the practice of law to the machine, a condition on where confidential information may go, a duty to verify, and a duty to disclose to the court. We set out the text, what it leaves open, a checklist for a firm, and nine questions to ask any AI vendor.
Read: what § 6068.1 requires by January 1 →Nine questions to ask any AI vendor, and our answers in writing →
What Heppner means for your practice.
ClearlyConcise founder John M. Jensen — a California attorney — on the first major decision on attorney-client privilege and generative AI: what the court actually held, why the ruling is narrower than the headlines suggest, the gap the new statute leaves on the client's side, and what to tell clients now.
What your client tells an AI →Nine questions to ask any AI vendor before Jan. 1 — the Perspective column in the Daily Journal (Oct. 9, 2026), reprinted with permission →
For attorneys.
If you practice law and would like a conversation about ClearlyConcise — the architecture, the pilot, or the underlying Heppner problem — we'd value hearing from you.