In United States v. Heppner (S.D.N.Y., February 2026), a federal court held that information attorneys and clients put into consumer-tier AI tools — Claude desktop, ChatGPT, the $20-a-month subscription — is not protected by attorney-client privilege. CounselExpress is the desktop application built for the path the court left open: enterprise-tier inference over AWS Bedrock, case files staying on the attorney's machine, four structured analyses ready in minutes.
Built for solo and small-firm personal injury attorneys. First product in a CogleGroup line aimed at the grindy, emotionally draining work line professionals do — CogleGroup announced May 9.
That is the holding in Heppner, taken almost verbatim from the opinion. The court found that all recognized privileges require a trusting human relationship, that no such relationship exists between an attorney and a public AI platform, and that inputs to the platform are shared with a third party — which waives the privilege the same way handing the document to opposing counsel would.
The court drew one explicit line: enterprise-tier deployments with contractual confidentiality protections — Claude over AWS Bedrock, Claude commercial / government plans, ChatGPT Enterprise — are different. Those agreements exclude inputs from training and bind the provider to confidentiality terms. The consumer apps don't.
For any attorney handling privileged work, this is not a "future best practice." It is the working rule, today, in the Southern District of New York and on its way to the circuits behind it.
A solo or small-firm PI attorney runs 60–150+ open cases. Each one carries hundreds to thousands of pages of medical records, billing statements, police reports, and discovery responses. The reading layer is where defense counsel's paralegal team turns its time advantage into a litigation advantage. Most plaintiffs' firms can't match the headcount and shouldn't have to — the work is structured enough that a well-built tool, used by the attorney, closes the gap.
The obvious AI shortcut — paste the medical records into ChatGPT, ask for a timeline — is the path Heppner just closed. The firms doing it are now opposing counsel's discovery target. CounselExpress is the alternative path.
Chronological treatment history across every provider, costs matched to billing records, treatment gaps flagged the way defense counsel will flag them.
Statute-of-limitations countdown, service-of-process status, discovery deadlines, outstanding items per case — the running scoreboard for every matter on the docket.
Fault and liability extraction, witness and evidence inventory, and the contradictions inside the responding officer's narrative the report itself does not surface.
Per-request deficiency review under the relevant rules of civil
procedure, with O.C.G.A. § 9-11-37 awareness for
Georgia practice. Includes a draft motion-to-compel skeleton
ready for attorney review.
Every model call CounselExpress makes is to Anthropic's Claude over AWS Bedrock — not the consumer Claude API. Bedrock inputs are not used for training, are bound by AWS's enterprise data-isolation terms, and sit inside the contractual-confidentiality envelope Heppner identified as the privilege-preserving path. Same model. Different legal posture.
CounselExpress is an installed desktop application. PDFs sit in a folder on the attorney's machine. Local SQLite holds the structured analyses. Only the specific extracted text needed for the requested analysis is sent to Bedrock — and only when the attorney triggers the analysis.
The Discovery Analysis is structured around the rules attorneys
actually cite — including O.C.G.A. § 9-11-37 for
Georgia practice and the corresponding Federal Rule 37 framework.
Output is cite-checkable and edit-ready, not a transcript of an
attorney chatting with a chatbot.
The PI attorney reading 3,000 pages of medical records on a Saturday is doing skilled, important work — and most of it is grinding. The chamber-of-commerce coordinator hand-emailing 800 members about an event is doing skilled, important work — and most of it is grinding. The county planner reviewing the same site-plan checklist for the forty-third time this month is doing skilled, important work — and most of it is grinding.
CounselExpress is the first product in a CogleGroup line built explicitly around line professionals doing emotionally draining, repetitive work inside regulated processes. The product takes the reading and structuring layer; the attorney keeps the judgment layer. That is the shape we'll keep building against — in litigation this week, in chamber engagement on Day 11, in planning permits on Day 12, and across the Cogle line after.
Not "AI replaces the line professional." AI takes the part of the job nobody got into the work to do, and gives it back as time.
On Day 9 (May 9, 2026), Todd Merrill and Jim Hasty announced the GP partnership behind CogleGroup — an Anthropic Claude Partner Network candidate building software-quality services for regulated and operationally-complex mid-market work. CounselExpress is product 1 of 3 this week:
Same partnership. Same Velocity Process underneath. Three deliberately distinct products, three deliberately distinct line professionals.
First wave is solo and small-firm PI attorneys, Georgia-first, so the discovery-rules code path can ship deeper state-specific behavior before generalizing. Free for 30 days in exchange for two 30-minute feedback calls.
Prefer a sales conversation? Book a discovery call with CogleGroup →