Law firms have used ethical walls for decades: when a lawyer is screened from a matter, the document system stops them opening its files. The control is well understood, well tested, and enforced in the place everyone looks, the user interface.
AI assistants connected to document management systems change where the risk sits.
The new path around the wall
A screened lawyer never has to open a walled document to learn what's in it. They can ask an assistant a broad question: "What are our standard indemnity positions in recent SaaS deals?" If the retrieval layer behind that assistant searches across matters the lawyer can't see, the answer can carry walled content back in a summary, a snippet or a citation.
Nobody opened a restricted file. The interface worked exactly as designed. The wall still leaked.
Where to test
If your firm connects an AI tool to its document system, through MCP or any other integration, three checks are worth doing before anyone relies on it:
- Is the wall enforced at retrieval, on every call? Permission checks have to happen where the assistant searches, not only where a human browses.
- Does it cover snippets and citations, not just full documents? A two-line excerpt in a search result is still disclosure.
- Whose permissions does the session carry? If a connection is set up once by an administrator and then shared, every user inherits the administrator's view.
A simple test: sign in as a lawyer screened from one matter and ask the assistant broad research questions that the walled matter would answer well. Then read the citations.
Why it's worth doing now
Ethical walls exist for conflicts and client confidentiality. A wall that holds in the interface but not in the assistant is not a partial control. From the client's point of view it's a breach, and it's much cheaper to find in a test than in a conflicts review.
I'm Jonathan Melton. I run FusionAL, which reviews how AI agents and MCP tools are permissioned when they reach regulated systems.
Top comments (0)