May 4, 2026 / Press
Robert Strauss Quoted in CNBC on the Hidden Legal Risks of Clients Taking AI Estate Planning Advice
Robert Strauss was recently featured in a CNBC “Inside Wealth” article entitled, “Lawyers to the wealthy warn that AI legal advice comes with serious risks.” The piece takes a hard look at a new headache plaguing estate planning attorneys; clients are increasingly leaning on AI chatbots to audit their legal documents, challenging their lawyers’ judgment, and unknowingly risking attorney-client privilege.
Rob speaks from experience, citing specific patterns he and his colleagues have seen with more and more clients recently. Clients will upload trust documents to AI chatbots and return to their attorneys with long lists of questions and AI-suggested edits, many of which are inappropriate for the client’s situation. While the questions themselves are not always unreasonable, the process creates a significant drain on time and resources.
“The questions are fine, but it results in spending more time on the matter than we would ordinarily spend,” Rob relays in his conversation with CNBC. “We end up spending two, three, four hours of time dealing with stuff that so far has amounted to nothing. I have not actually received a single workable suggestion from that process.”
Beyond AI-aided client input simply being inefficient, Rob brings up a more serious concern; clients are sharing sensitive legal documents with large language models like ChatGPT or Claude risk waiving attorney-client privilege, a legal protection that courts are beginning to scrutinize more deeply as AI use in the legal industry becomes more pervasive.
Weinstock Manion is currently revising its client contracts to explicitly warn clients of this risk.