As a lawyer, I am the controller of the personal data of my clients or of the writers of emails and originators of other forms of messages who send me letters and other communications. As for emails, I keep received and sent for about 3 years, but I store some important messages (e.g. evidence) separately in client files, or for myself for the time necessary to protect my own rights.
The relationship between a lawyer and a client is based on confidentiality. At the same time, the processing of personal data is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the mandate contract. The performance of the lawyer’s profession is dominated by the obligation of confidentiality, which is in principal comparable to the confidentiality of confessions. Exceptions are provided in particular by the Act on Advocacy and professional lawyers’ regulations.
The standard archiving period for attorney files according to the professional regulation issued by the Czech Bar Association is 5 years from the end of the case. I keep files only in electronic form, on the OneDrive cloud within my professional MS Office license. Shredding an electronic file means deleting it. I use a secure connection when working with client data and of course I use an antivirus program. I use my own professional domain for email correspondence.
To improve the quality of my professional work, I use a specialized AI model for searching for court case law (it works with a database of Czech court decisions), which allows more accurate results than the current search by keywords. I check the generated results in the form of annotated case law before using them in a client’s case, so as not to present the products of so-called hallucination.