legal-ai-incident-card-profile

LegalTech Incident Card — Spec #5 of the LegalTech 6-pack. Profile of the AI Incident Card spec scoped to legal-AI incidents at law firms, in-house legal departments, public defenders, and legal-AI vendors. Covers privilege breaches, work-product doctrine violations, Mata v. Avianca-class court-sanctioned hallucinations, conflict-check bypasses, UPL violations, and AI vendor training-data-use violations.

Part of the Kinetic Gain Protocol Suite.

Status: v0.1 draft. Profile at profile.json.

What this profile is

A structured incident-record format signed by the supervising attorney, sufficient for the firm's General Counsel, Managing Partner, outside ethics counsel, state bar disciplinary counsel, and (where required) the affected tribunal to triage and respond.

18 event types covering the full surface where a legal AI tool can produce a reportable incident:

• privileged-disclosure-to-unauthorized-recipient
• work-product-doctrine-violation
• cross-matter-information-leak
• conflict-check-bypass
• engagement-letter-out-of-scope-action
• court-sanctioned-hallucination-class (Mata v. Avianca)
• bar-discipline-trigger
• unauthorized-practice-of-law
• attorney-supervisor-bypass
• client-deepfake-impersonation-attempt
• ai-vendor-training-data-use-violation
• privilege-log-incomplete-due-to-ai-tagging
• ediscovery-tar-coding-error-systematic
• ediscovery-spoliation-by-ai-retention-policy
• bar-association-investigation-opened
• court-standing-order-violation
• billing-misconduct-ai-time-fraud
• cross-border-data-residency-violation

4 severities (S1-low → S4-critical), each with named escalation pathways.

10 referral pathways including LegalTech-distinctive: outside ethics counsel engagement, state bar disciplinary counsel notification, court disclosure (where the AI incident reached a tribunal), professional liability insurer notification, criminal-defense effective-assistance disclosure.

LegalTech-distinctive design

Privilege waiver risk taxonomy (6 codes) — no-privilege-risk-applicable → low-vendor-channel-only → moderate-third-party-but-recoverable (Fed. R. Evid. 502(d) clawback) → high-waiver-likely → critical-cross-matter-or-subject-matter. No sibling-vertical Incident Card has anything like this — privilege waiver mechanics are unique to LegalTech. Filing an Incident Card without a privilege-waiver-risk assessment is malpractice-adjacent.

Signature REQUIRED, not optional. Most sibling-vertical Incident Cards make the ed25519 signature optional. LegalTech requires it because Incident Cards reach state bar disciplinary counsel + tribunals — there has to be an attesting attorney whose name is on the line, and the signature establishes that the card was issued by them and not retroactively altered.

Criminal-defense effective-assistance disclosure pathway. Triggered when the affected matter is criminal defense AND severity ≥ S2-moderate. Surfaces a Sixth Amendment obligation no sibling vertical has — the defendant (and any appellate counsel) need to know an AI tool was implicated in a moderate-or-higher incident on their matter.

Court disclosure pathway as a first-class referral channel — for court-sanctioned-hallucination-class and court-standing-order-violation. The incident isn't fully addressed until the affected tribunal has been notified.

Use

# Validate the profile is well-formed
node -e "JSON.parse(require('fs').readFileSync('profile.json','utf8'))"

What this is NOT

• Not a bar discipline outcome — documents the incident; the bar's separate process determines discipline.
• Not a malpractice waiver — filing does not waive defenses the firm may have.
• Not itself privilege-waiving — filing should be done with privilege-preservation review.

Composes with

• incident-card-spec — the upstream spec this profile conforms to
• matter-decision-record-audit-stream — emits legaltech_ai_incident.filed / .remediated / .regulator_referred / .court_disclosed / .client_notified events
• aba-rule-1-6-readiness-evidence-bundle — sibling compliance Evidence Bundle
• legal-applicant-bias-coverage-lab — sibling bias Evidence Bundle
• state-bar-ai-disclosure-tracker — sibling state-bar lifecycle tracker
• Kinetic Gain Protocol Suite — umbrella

Compliance posture

Incident-readiness scaffolding for law firms + legal-AI vendors. Card format does not establish bar compliance, does not waive privilege, does not constitute discipline. Per the standing public-language guardrail across the Suite.

License

Profile + supporting documentation: MIT.