law.org.ai / mn · an Org.AI Foundation program
Minnesota has twice let a certified non-lawyer inside the attorney-client privilege — students in 2013, paraprofessionals in 2020.
We are preparing the third ask.
- Precedents
- 2Supervised law students (file ADM09-8002, 2013) and legal paraprofessionals (file ADM19-8002, 2020, pilot made permanent). Both certified non-lawyers, both placed inside privileged client work by rule of the Minnesota Supreme Court.
- The clause
- Rule 2E, quoted verbatim belowSupervised Practice Rules, Rule 2E, read from revisor.mn.gov. It is the non-waiver sentence Minnesota already wrote for a person. The third ask keeps every condition and changes the noun.
- Petitions filed
- None. This page precedes the petition.On purpose. The map is published first so the people who regulate the practice of law in Minnesota can read it before anyone asks them for anything. Nothing on this site is legal advice.
The precedent
This is not a new door. Minnesota built it twice, and both times the sky stayed up.
In 2013 the Minnesota Supreme Court put law students inside the privilege.
Clinical legal education needed students in the room where clients speak plainly, and lawyers were refusing — the student was a third party, and a third party can break the privilege. So the Court changed the rule. The sentence it wrote is still in force, as Rule 2E of the Supervised Practice Rules:
Communication between the client and the student shall be privileged under the same rules that govern attorney-client privilege and work product doctrine, and the presence of a student during communication between the lawyer and the client shall not, standing alone, waive these evidentiary privileges.Minnesota Supervised Practice Rules, Rule 2E — revisor.mn.gov
In 2020 the Court did it again, for legal paraprofessionals — this time as a pilot that measured itself, reported, and became permanent.
Both times, the same four conditions: certified through the Board of Law Examiners; supervised by a named lawyer who carries personal professional responsibility; identified to the client and accepted by them; bound to a lawyer's duty of confidentiality.
The third ask keeps every condition and changes the noun.
The ask
An "authorized agent" amendment to the Supervised Practice Rules — the same shape, with machine-appropriate conditions.
Seven conditions, each borrowed from a rule Minnesota already has.
A named Minnesota lawyer directs the engagement and carries personal professional responsibility — which is also the exact condition the first federal AI-privilege decision found missing when it left this door open. The client is told an agent participates, and accepts. The agent is certified and registered through the Board of Law Examiners, time-limited and renewable. A hard technical floor: no training on client data, no third-party disclosure, contractual confidentiality — the consumer-terms defect that decided that federal case, prohibited outright. The reserved acts stay with the lawyer: court, final advice, pleadings, fees, settlement. A tamper-evident audit trail — which lawyer directed which task on which matter, when — held as client-file material. And a pilot first, with published metrics and a default-to-permanent trigger: the paraprofessional program's own path.
Nothing in the list is novel except the noun. That is the point.
The pilot
Free, supervised, measured — a law-school clinic where students and a supervised machine serve people who would otherwise get no lawyer at all.
A second-year student sits with a client the market was never going to serve.
The machine drafts; the student questions, corrects, and learns the judgment the drafting used to teach — and the client-counseling skill the next generation of the bar exam will actually test. A supervising lawyer reviews and signs. The client — who at market rates would have gotten nothing — gets representation. Every step is logged. The service is free and grant-funded, inside Minnesota's own short-term limited-services rule, which was built for exactly this shape of help.
The pilot's product is the record: outcomes a court can read before anyone asks it to make anything permanent.
No clinic is running. This is the design we intend to bring to Minnesota's law schools, and to no one else first.
What Utah taught
Utah opened the first legal regulatory sandbox in 2020 and is closing it in 2027. Not because anyone was harmed.
The harm data was excellent. The design failed anyway.
Through April 2025 the published rate was roughly one complaint per 5,869 services delivered. What sank the sandbox was everything else: entrants with no real Utah presence using the authorization as national marketing; a two-person office hand-vetting every applicant until it drowned; participants implying the court had endorsed them.
So the Minnesota design answers Utah point by point. Minnesota first, at real scale, for Minnesotans. Registration and reporting instead of bespoke vetting — an audit trail a regulator can read by machine makes oversight nearly free, and Utah's own post-mortem recommends exactly this shape. Endorsement claims prohibited in writing, by us, before anyone asks. And permanence tied to published metrics, not to any champion staying on the bench.
A precedent that cannot survive its sponsor's retirement is not a precedent. It is a favor.
Already moving
Minnesota's bar is ahead of us, and we are drafting to meet its work — not around it.
On August 27, 2025, the Minnesota State Bar Association's AI Committee approved a report and recommendation to the Minnesota Supreme Court.
Its subject: a path — sandbox, guidance, non-prosecution policy, or a combination — for AI tools that serve access to justice, tested responsibly rather than stifled. The committee's public materials, its 2024 working-group report, and its chair's published interviews are linked under "Where it comes from." Anything this program brings to Minnesota will be built to fit that work.
We have asked for nothing yet. Reading precedes asking.
Where it comes from
Every claim on this page names a primary source we actually fetched. Where we could not fetch one, we say so instead of citing it.
The list, in one paragraph.
The Supervised Practice Rules, including Rule 2E, from revisor.mn.gov. The Court's order of August 6, 2013 in file ADM09-8002, retrieved from the Minnesota State Law Library's archive. The paraprofessional pilot order, file ADM19-8002, from mncourts.gov. The Board of Law Examiners' supervised-practice pages. The MSBA AI Committee's pages and 2024 working-group report, from mnbars.org. Utah's sandbox history and published complaint data, from its Office of Legal Services Innovation. One order in the 2013 file, from March, we have not yet retrieved; until we have read it, nothing on this page cites it.
Nothing that merely felt like evidence is in the room.
What this is
This page is the Minnesota case for extending a rule Minnesota has already written twice: that a certified, supervised, client-accepted non-lawyer inside the privilege does not break it.
It is addressed to the people who regulate the practice of law in Minnesota, and it is published before any petition so they can read it first.
Nothing here is legal advice. No clinic is running. No petition has been filed.