The profession, the legal system and society have all traditionally seen loyalty, confidentiality, care and competence as cornerstones of professional responsibility. Lawyers are in a fiduciary relationship with their clients – clients need to be able to trust their lawyers to provide advice and represent them loyally in the legal system, uninfluenced by any concern other than the client’s interests. We examine lawyers’ general duty of care and competence in Chapter 5 and their obligations to avoid conflicts of interest in Chapter 6 . The topic for this chapter is the duty of confidentiality: the obligation to keep secret all communications made by the client to the lawyer about their affairs and all the information learned about the client directly or indirectly during the professional relationship (subject to various exceptions to be discussed).

In evidence law, a privilege can prevent the discovery or evidentiary use of certain sensitive information. Many privileges apply to communication with specified persons such as lawyers, doctors, psychologists, accountants, clergy, or spouses. A major shortcoming of current privilege law is that it tends to protect relationships that are more common in higher economic strata. Low-income people do not benefit equally from privileges because their relationships are less likely to meet the requirements set forth in statutes and case law. The time has come to level the playing field and extend the valuable protections of evidentiary privileges more uniformly throughout society. Evidentiary privilege should not depend on economic privilege.

Chapter 8 continues the focus on the nurse–patient relationship by examining legal and moral requirements around patient privacy and confidentiality, and mandatory reporting. It explains requirements in relation to the management of patient information, including reporting of child abuse, family violence and professional misconduct.

This chapter examines two dimensions of AI assurance for systems designed to assist unrepresented litigants: (1) reliability and (2) privacy and accountability. Reliability encompasses accuracy, calibration, robustness, and bias. Privacy and accountability involve balancing data needs with the protection of sensitive information and ensuring the responsible deployment of AI. These considerations take on heightened importance given unrepresented litigants’ unique vulnerabilities and legal contexts.

Reliability standards must be higher for unrepresented litigants, who cannot verify AI outputs, than for legal professionals, who can exercise oversight. Privacy and accountability challenges arise from AI systems’ need for vast training datasets containing sensitive legal information, creating tensions between the effectiveness of these systems and data protection rights under frameworks such as the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) and the EU AI Act.

Effective AI assurance requires interdisciplinary collaboration between technologists and legal stakeholders to develop appropriate methodologies for defining, measuring, and verifying both reliability and privacy protections in legal AI systems.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) represents a major shift in technological innovation, capable of transforming daily life and professional sectors, including the law. GenAI leverages advanced models to create new content, from text and images to music. In legal practice, it offers opportunities to streamline tasks like legal research, document drafting, contract review, and client communication. However, widespread use of general-purpose GenAI tools (e.g., ChatGPT) not designed specifically for legal contexts introduces significant risks. These include factual inaccuracies, breaches of confidentiality, privacy violations, and potential copyright infringements. Some US court cases have already revealed the misuse of AI, citing fabricated case-laws. In response, there is growing demand to regulate AI use in the legal field through revised codes of conduct and specific guidelines. This study focuses on the mentioned national and international guidelines issued for legal professionals using GenAI. Using content analysis methods, the research sheds light on shared policies such as the necessity of client consent and confidentiality protection and risks forecasted as intellectual property violations and the reinforcement of cognitive biases, highlighting how bar associations and similar bodies are shaping responsible AI use in legal practice.

This chapter is about trust. It is the only chapter in the book that considers the opinions of professionals who had not used machine translation at work. Most of these professionals were prepared to use machine translation if needed. Some were enthusiastic about it. Others had reservations which they would want to see addressed before deciding to use a machine translation tool. These reservations included: (1) concerns about accuracy; (2) concerns about privacy and confidentiality; (3) perceptions of social and professional norms and whether their use of machine translation would be accepted by others; and (4) concerns about how machine translation may lack ‘the human touch’ in sensitive interactions. The chapter examines human communication in relation to the concept of empathy and AI’s ability to mimic it. It ends with a discussion of workplace training by exploring what machine translation users would like to see covered in initiatives aimed at enhancing their trust judgment abilities.

Medical providers involved in child abuse cases will encounter a variety of issues with legal implications, including informed consent, appropriate documentation, confidentiality, mandated reporting and potential liability. Consequently, all medical providers who may become involved in child abuse cases should have a fundamental understanding of child maltreatment laws in their jurisdiction. While informed consent is a well-established medicolegal doctrine in many countries, there are often jurisdiction-specific variations in cases of suspected child maltreatment. Complete, accurate and objective medical documentation is also imperative, as medical reports are frequently submitted in legal proceedings. Care should be taken, however, to ensure appropriate release and retention of medical records in accordance with country-specific legislation (e.g., Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and 21st Century Cures Act in the United States). Finally, medical providers should understand their responsibility to report to the appropriate protective services agency if there is reasonable suspicion that child maltreatment has occurred. A practitioner’s failure to adhere to statutory requirements may result in negative actions against the provider.

The relation of subordination that characterises the contract of employment is created by the implied terms of the contract of employment such as the duty of obedience. Recently the courts have confirmed that both parties are under a duty not to destroy mutual trust and confidence and to perform the contract in good faith. The employee owes a duty of loyalty and both parties have to respect confidentiality. The chapter also examines the legal effect of breach of health and safety standards, tax law, immigration law and competition law on the enforceability of the contract of employment.

Chapter 4 is dedicated to the concept of informality as a crucial legal concept for the understanding of trilogues. It begins from a twofold observation. First, the informal nature of trilogues is stated in black and white in a significant variety of legal instruments. Secondly, the role of legal scholarship is to make sense of that unequivocal characterization. Drawing on institutional theory, this chapter argues that informality is a full-blown concept of EU law, and it sets about defining its characteristics. To that end, it compares trilogues with two other informal bodies, namely the Euro Group and the Informal Council meetings. The core idea of this chapter is that the codification of informality translates into legal terms the intention of the institutions to protect certain spaces from an excessive penetration of legal normativity. This intention, in turn, is indicative of the desire to preserve those spaces for the emergence of powerful social frameworks where genuine exchanges among actors may occur; exchanges that should be conducive to compromise.

This chapter covers the common ethical and legal issues that arise in psychiatry. It begins with an overview of the four ethical principles guiding medical practice: autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. A brief discussion of parens patriae and police power follow, highlighting their particular applications in psychiatry. The chapter then goes on to illustrate how the balancing of these principles guides everyday ethical and legal issues. Confidentiality and its exceptions in the interests of safety and prevention of abuse/neglect are covered in detail. Next, informed consent and decision-making are explored. The requirements for informed consent are reviewed, leading into a discussion of those instances when an individual lacks capacity for informed consent (surrogate decision-making, involuntary admission and treatment, and exceptions). Finally, the chapter closes with an examination of the prohibitions against dual relationships, including sexual relationships, with patients.

This chapter explores the theory underpinning qualitative methods, namely semi-structured interviews and focus groups, and issues of methodological coherence in adopting a digital approach. We offer an in-depth exploration of the practical considerations of adopting digital methods. This includes the challenges of building a rapport with the participant, familiarity with technology for both researcher and participant, scheduling, and data protection issues. We explore pertinent ethical considerations, including institutional approval, informed consent, confidentiality, and the ongoing ethical responsibilities of the researcher engaged in qualitative research. We draw upon our experiences of using synchronous online videoconferencing platforms to conduct semi-structured interviews and focus groups, integrating our reflections throughout. Whilst necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, the associated need for social distancing and the potential for further regional restrictions, we argue that digital methods transcend the current global situation, offering opportunities to facilitate qualitative research that may extend beyond geographical borders, attenuate fiscal limitations, and enable greater collaboration between researchers.