Compelled, confidential, privileged, clean

Compelled: locked to the proceeding

When a court forces a party or a stranger to produce documents, the person who receives them takes on an obligation to the court not to use them for any other purpose. In Australia the High Court described this in Hearne v Street (2008) as a substantive legal obligation, not a courtesy. For discovered documents in NSW civil courts, the Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 2005 (NSW), rule 21.7 says it in terms: no copy of, or information from, a discovered document may be disclosed or used other than for the purposes of the proceedings, except with the court's leave or once the document has been received into evidence in open court.

What it covers, in practice:

• Documents on the other side's discovery list, and the information in them.
• Documents produced under subpoena by a third party, and documents produced in answer to a notice to produce.
• Answers to interrogatories.
• Results of a court-ordered inspection, forensic examination or similar protocol.
• Affidavits, witness statements and expert reports served under a court timetable, until they are read or received in evidence.

What you may do: use the material for the proceeding it was produced in. Read it, analyse it, refer to it in submissions in that proceeding, put it in the court book for that proceeding. What you may not do without the court's leave: use it in another proceeding, in a complaint to a regulator or professional body, in a letter to someone's employer, in a public post, or in a book. Uploading it to an AI service puts it into a third party's system. The NSW Supreme Court's practice note (SC Gen 23 paragraphs 9A and 9B) makes AI use of such material conditional on safeguards rather than forbidding it outright; this site's rule, that compelled material never goes into an AI tool, is stricter, and is our policy.

How the lock comes off: the court gives leave, usually on an application explaining the purpose; or the document is received into evidence in open court, which in NSW lifts the rule 21.7 restriction only so far as no other order or law still applies (rule 21.7(2)); or the court orders release. The obligation survives the end of the case: discontinuing or settling does not release it. If you want to use compelled material elsewhere, the route is an application, not a judgment call. Until then it is locked.

Confidential: usable with care, not for publication

Confidentiality comes from outside the court: a clause in an employment or services contract, a non-disclosure agreement, privacy and health-records law, or a court order restricting publication of names or material. It does not usually stop you using the document in the proceeding it concerns. Courts have ways to handle confidential material, including confidentiality regimes, sealed envelopes and orders limiting who may see what. Ask the registry or a free legal service what applies in your court before filing it.

It does stop you doing other things with it: publishing it, sending it to people who have no part in the matter, or feeding it to a system that keeps a copy. If a document contains another person's personal or health information, that person's interests attach to it whatever your dispute is about. Redaction reduces the risk; it does not by itself authorise disclosure outside the proceeding.

Keep a note of the source of the confidentiality, such as "clause 14 of the building contract" or "contains third-party medical details". The labels guide explains what a CONFIDENTIAL heading on a letter does and does not do; a heading is a claim, and the contract or order behind it is what matters.

Privileged and without prejudice

Yours. Advice from a lawyer is protected by client legal privilege if it was confidential and for the dominant purpose of legal advice; a self-represented party's own confidential documents prepared for the dominant purpose of the litigation are protected by section 120. Not every note you make about the case qualifies; the purpose and the confidentiality matter. See the Evidence Act 1995 (NSW), sections 118 and 119. Genuine settlement communications are protected by section 131, which has its own exceptions. Privilege can be lost by conduct inconsistent with keeping it confidential (section 122). Whether uploading advice to an AI service, or forwarding it to a friend, has that effect is not settled and depends on the circumstances. The safe rule is that advice and without-prejudice material stay on your own machine, in their own folder, and go into no third-party system without a deliberate decision.

Theirs, by mistake. Sometimes the other side's advice or internal notes arrive by accident: attached to the wrong email, left in a document's history, included in a bundle. Stop reading as soon as you realise. Do not copy or forward it. Tell the sender in a short open email that it appears to have been sent in error, that you have stopped reading, and ask how they would like it returned or destroyed. Then get advice. The court can restrain you from using it, and reading on can lead to orders against you and undo the good work in your matter.

Clean: not locked by a court process

Clean material is what you can build on: your own contract, payslips and records; emails and letters sent to you in the ordinary course; documents you created before the dispute; public records, judgments and legislation; anything you obtained lawfully and independently of any court process. It is still subject to any confidentiality that attaches to its contents, and to ordinary law. But it is not locked.