Tate Group Automotive v. Legacy Automotive Capital

What happened

Tate Group Automotive sued Legacy Automotive Capital, The Reynolds and Reynolds Company and two individuals in the Texas Business Court. In discovery, the plaintiff withheld ChatGPT conversations belonging to Kris Tate, a non-lawyer party representative, on attorney work-product grounds.

The defendants made two arguments. The first was that work product does not extend to a non-lawyer's conversations with an artificial intelligence tool at all. The second was that using the tool waived any protection that otherwise applied.

What the court did

The court reviewed the conversations in camera and sided with the plaintiff on the privilege question. It adopted the reasoning of Warner v. Gilbarco, Inc., 2026 WL 373043 (E.D. Mich. Feb. 10, 2026), and Morgan v. V2X, Inc., 2026 WL 864223 (D. Colo. Mar. 30, 2026), that work-product protection is waived only by disclosure to an adversary, or in circumstances that substantially increase the likelihood that an adversary obtains the material. It noted that Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 192.5(a)(1) protects material prepared by or for a party, not only by or for a lawyer.

It expressly disagreed with United States v. Heppner, 2026 WL 436479 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 17, 2026).

The court then ordered two things. The plaintiff was to disclose all documents submitted for in camera review that had been withheld solely on relevance or non-responsiveness grounds. And the plaintiff was to "disclose to Defendants all discovery materials or products that it has shared with ChatGPT (by Bates number, if applicable), including any materials that were produced pursuant to the Protective Order."

The court recommended that the parties negotiate an amendment to the protective order governing artificial intelligence, and observed that the issue is novel: all authorities cited by the parties dated from 2026, and one of them had called its own ruling a question of first impression nationwide.

Where it stands

The ruling is a court minute entry of June 3, 2026, following an earlier minute entry of April 20, 2026. It is expressly non-final. The court granted leave to file a formal motion for reconsideration or for protection if a party needed an appealable ruling. No such motion was located as of September 17, 2026.

The obligation it engaged

The second half of this order is the part that matters to an expert, and it is easy to miss behind the privilege holding. The content of the conversations stayed protected. What had been fed into the system did not. The party had to identify, by Bates number, every discovery material it had put into ChatGPT, including material produced under the protective order.

That is Clause 6 of the Standard, custody and confidentiality, arriving as a discovery obligation rather than as an ethical one. The clause asks the expert to confirm, before submitting anything, that doing so is consistent with the protective order, and to establish what leaves the expert's environment and who retains it. Here a court required a party to produce the list of what it had submitted. An expert who cannot generate that list on demand is in the position the plaintiff was in, and the difference between producing it and reconstructing it is the difference between a routine supplemental response and a hearing.

Clause 7, contemporaneous record, is what makes the list producible. A log kept as the work proceeds, naming each system and what was given to it, answers an order of this kind directly. Reconstructing the same list afterward from memory and file timestamps does not, and the reconstruction is itself discoverable.

There is a further point for anyone drafting an engagement letter. The court recommended that the parties negotiate an amendment to the protective order governing artificial intelligence, which is the same instinct that produced the orders collected at AI clauses in protective orders. An expert retained into a case where that negotiation has not happened is working without knowing what the rule will be, and the rule may be settled after the work is done and applied to it. Asking retaining counsel at the outset whether the protective order addresses AI, and what the answer is, costs nothing and is the only way to comply with Clause 6 rather than hope to have complied with it.

Sources

• The Business Court of Texas, Eleventh Division · June 3, 2026
  Court minute entry regarding ChatGPT materials in camera review
• Damien Charlotin · September 17, 2026
  AI discovery cases database

What could not be confirmed

The ruling is a minute entry rather than a signed opinion and is expressly non-final. The April 20, 2026 minute entry it follows was not obtained. Whether either party sought an appealable ruling was not confirmed against the docket.